Warming Up With The 100K View of API Management

This is my first blog post, following a very nice week, offline in Maine. I have purposely setup the API Evangelist network to be a mesh network of API research project nodes, allowing anyone to to start from ground zero and work their way through the different aspects of the API universe. The dirty little secret, is I set this up to benefit me first, then you, the reader. After I get back to the world from time off, I'm very disoriented and I need a way to start over and work my way back through all of my projects.

Each time I pick my research up, I need to work my way through it, refresh my memory, and hopefully constantly realign my view of the universe, not just after vacations, but on a week to week basis. So this morning I started with the 100K view of providing APIs.

When I started API Evangelist, I acknowledged that the technology of APIs was being worked out, and the business of APIs was something that needed researching. Now in 2013, I'm seeing the same theme emerge around the politics of APIs.

This venn diagram is a rough, 100K view of what I consider to reflect a healthy strategy for an API provider. Depending on each company's goals, they may give more attention to any of these building blocks.

If you are coming from the enterprise you will see much of this as SOA governance, which I have spoken about in the past being the legacy inverse of API management, and will continue to articulate in future stories as I can.

Now that I'm warmed up with the 100K view of the API space, I'm ready to finish work on my API management, discovery and integration white papers I was working on before I left, as well as my weekly API monitoring and analysis.