“API governance is the practice of applying common rules relating to API standards and security policies to your APIs. It also quite often involves designing your APIs based off a common data model of approved reusable resources/model objects (this is a best practice in itself which we will come back to later). Finally, governance can be used to ensure your APIs are sufficiently enriched with metadata for them to be easily consumed by a wider audience, both within your enterprise (e.g. product managers), and externally (e.g. partners). The goal of API governance is to ensure proper standardization of your APIs so that they are discoverable, consistent, and reusable.“
— DigitalML – What is API Governance? 8 Best Practices for API Governance Success
“API governance is the processes and collective decision-making done by stakeholders when creating and reproducing web-based APIs. Collective decision-making is a vital part of that sentence. In more simple terms, a collective decision is a rule or policy. The result of API governance is creating policies, rules, and conventions that allow the parties involved to work independently of one another but effectively towards the same goal. API governance produces policies concerned with:
— Jarrett Retz on Rapid API
– versioning
– tracking
– documenting
– deprecating
– integrating”
API governance is about establishing, documenting and enforcing best practices relating to design, documentation, and testing across your APIs, allowing potentially large numbers of APIs written by all sorts of different developers to feel like a unified, coherent, consistent ecosystem.
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