When you are down in the weeds of API operations reading up on the latest technology trends and utilizing the latest API services and tooling, it is easy to feel like modern API operations are mature and well-defined, and technological advances will take us into the future. However, when you compare the web and APIs to other industries you realize how much more work there is before we are all grown up and mature. I do a regular amount of reading and research on electricity, plumbing, telephone, radio, and other industries similar to APIs when it comes to being a utility, and I enjoy playing around with comparisons to help me understand where we are at in this journey.
As an exercise on this topic, let’s compare APIs to electricity. While there are some shortcomings of this analogy I think we can agree that APIs are quickly becoming a ubiquitous utility similar to electricity, with cross-cutting implications across almost every industry. Now, imagine if electrician teams didn’t have to follow standards, regulation, possess any training, and are just left to their own devices when it comes to wiring up the electricity for our business—-we will just have different teams on different floors of the building wiring up using their own voltage, wiring, plug configuration, and hope they are talking to each other. It seems ridiculous to think how undisciplined we are with APIs, which are powering so much of our global economy.
I think we deliver APIs like we do because 1) they are hard to see, and 2) the Internet and Web is still so new. If you look at the first 25-30 years of electricity and compare with where we are now with APIs, you see a lot of similarities when it comes to how business got done. In the early days of electricity there wasn’t a lot of standardization, regulation, and industry was eager to just get building and generating revenue, with minimal investment in improvements over time. Granted, people aren’t getting hurt or killed in similar ways to electricity in the early days, but I think we can argue that APIs cause a significant amount of personal and commercial damage when it comes to API reliability, privacy, security, and other areas.
We are seeing the groundwork being laid when it comes to the standardization, governance, and regulation of financial and healthcare APIs, with investments in some of these areas across other leading sectors. It is only a matter of time before more industries see a need for more investment in standardization, governance, and regulation, and we see common components that can be reused across multiple business sectors. There was a lot of money made in the early days of electricity, but there was even more money to be made once the energy industry and electrical grids were standardized, stabilized, and became more mature. It will be the same with APIs, and I know companies like to focus on APIs being their secret sauce, but really less than 10% reflects unique business offerings, and the rest of the APIs out there really should be commoditized, with this repeating itself every decade, increasing pace over time. I look forward to the day when we can focus on the core value we offer as businesses and the rest is just open source and reusable, and there are common components, standards, and blueprints for us all to work from. Having companies and teams work in isolation without a plan or being supported by standards won’t make sense for much longer.
