Reconciling My API Orchestration Research With the Evolution of IDE, SDK, and HTTP Clients

I've been tagging companies that I come across in my research, and stories that I find with the term "orchestration" for some time now. Some of this overlaps with what we know as cloud-centric orchestration using Puppet or Chef, but I am specifically looking for how we orchestrate across the API lifecycle which I feel overlaps with cloud orchestration, but pushes into some new realms.

As I'm carving off my orchestration research, I am also spending time reviewing a newer breed of what I'm calling API hubs, workspaces, or garages. Over the last year, I've broken out IDE research from my overall API Discovery research, and SDK from my API Management research, and client from my API Integration research. In parallel with an API-centric way of life, I want all my research to be as modular as possible, allowing me to link it together into meaningful ways that help me better understand how the space works, or could work.

Now that I'm thinking terms of orchestration, something that seems to be a core characteristic of these new API hubs, work spaces, or garages--I'm seeing a possibly new vision of the API life-cycle. I'm going to organize these new hubs, work spaces, and garages under my IDE research. I am starting to believe that these new work spaces are just the next generation IDE meant to span the entire API life-cycle--we will see how this thought evolves.

This new approach to API IDEs gives us design, and development capabilities, but also allows us to mock and deploy APIs. You can generate API documentation, and SDKs, and I'm seeing hints of orchestration using Github and Docker. I'm seeing popular clients like Postman evolve to be more like a API life-cycle IDE, and I'm also seeing API design tooling like Restlet Studio invest in HTTP clients to expand beyond just design, adding live client interaction, testing, and other vital life-cycle elements.

None of my research is absolute. It is meant to help me make sense of the space, and give me a way to put news I curate, companies I discover, and open source tooling into meaningful buckets that might also help you define a meaningful version of your own API life-cycle. I apologize if this post is a little incoherent, but it is how I work through my thoughts around the API space, how things are expanding and evolving in real-time--something I hope will come into better focus in coming weeks.