You can see the tussle between what API producers want and what API consumers want present in the API portals and experiences of leading public API producers, but this is a theater production that plays out over and over within the enterprise, and behind closed door partnerships between enterprise organizations. Publishing complete and accurate API documentation is the most visible evidence of API producers giving consumers what they want or need, but other resources like sandboxes, examples, clients, SDKs, and other machine-readable artifacts like OpenAPI and Postman or Bruno collections also provide tea leaves that can be read to understand the tango occurring in any given moment between API producer and consumer inside or outside the enterprise.
- Control - Both API producers and consumers want to have as much control as they can in any business arrangement defined by API contracts.
- Simplicity - Both API producers and consumers want things to be simple and do not want to have to do all of the work to apply and integrate APIs.
- Cost - Both API producers and consumers want things to be cheap and cost effective, ideally generate new revenue rather than being a cost center.
- Privacy - Both API producers and consumers want to maintain a wall of separation between what is behind their firewall, and just meeting in the middle.
- Security - Both API producers and consumers want to ensure that their systems and applications are secure, only poking precise holes to interoperate.
- Value - Both API producers and consumers want to extract value and potentially generate new value that they can capture and use in their operations.
APIs, documentation, and the other resources that reside within a public or private API portal will reflect this one-time, but also potentially and ideally ongoing negotiation. Technologists see artifacts, code, CLI, and clients, and business people see documentation, explorer, pricing, sandboxes, terms of service, and other experiences intended for humans. When you are assessing any API portal or presence you are experiencing the potential austerity imposed by the enterprise, the willingness of the enterprise to engage, and hopefully you also see feedback loops, forums, community SDKs, and other reciprocating properties for the community—if not, there are always other things going on behind the curtain. There is a lot of intent present in documentation, artifacts, code, and other resource API producers publish, but this intent is always matched and met with competing consumer interests-—this is what APIs are all about.
