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platforms.md

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Platforms

API platforms are software systems with integrated tools and processes that allow producers and consumers to effectively build, manage, publish, and consume APIs. They leverage existing infrastructure, as well as an ever-expanding and changing mix of API-driven services, to define, shape, and sustain business in a digital marketplace.

Elements

  • Discoverable - APIs are naturally searchable and discoverable. You rely on your teams to always publish their artifacts and supporting metadata, with workspaces and repositories indexed and made available as a defaut..That enables your infrastructure to keep pace with the business, and allows teams to focus on the work that moves business forward, not just busy work.
  • Collaborative - An API platform brings teams and APIs out of the shadows, lowering the walls between business and IT groups and making both the producer and consumer side of the API life cycle a collaborative affair. With a platform, every aspect of a modern API life cycle is modular, portable, shareable, and executable. That helps to support more stakeholders across API operations and attracts the business expertise to bring APIs in alignment with meaningful business outcomes.
  • Observable - API platforms allow for any output across API operations to be gathered, measured, and made available via visual dashboards and reporting. That helps make very abstract APIs more tangible and connects them to business outcomes. Observability allows you to understand the overall state of enterprise operations and begin making changes to steer your business where you want it to go. That eventually results in a more agile and nimble enterprise.
  • Automation - API platforms deliver APIs, but they are also defined by APIs, making every part of the API life cycle automatable. Automation allows you to use workflows that are scheduled and executed from one or more cloud regions via CI/CD pipelines. That means you can respond daily to events occurring at scale across your organization, whether they are critical or mundane. You can use smaller teams and still provide them with the resources they need to meet the future demand of their industry.
  • Governed - Platforms bolt API operations onto our existing organizational infrastructure via standards like SSO and SCIM, and allow us to “see” all of our APIs so that we can ensure they are reliable, secure, and consistent. An API platform grounds not just the design of our APIs, but also the way we document, test, deploy, distribute, and observe them. That elevates governance beyond naming and ordering APIs, allowing platform-level control over the entire life of hundreds or thousands of APIs.
  • Integrated - API platforms are seamlessly integrated with your existing operations. They take the source control and CI/CD you use as part of the existing software development life cycle and marry it to your gateway and APM solutions. That will equip your teams with a modern API life cycle that is bolted to your existing investment in on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

In the last decade, we’ve moved from using tens or hundreds of APIs to thousands. In the next decade we will move from thousands to hundreds of thousands, which can only be achieved with an industrial-grade API platform to carry the load. A platform approach to delivering the API products your consumers need provides a foundation to build trust, making marketing and sales more impactful.