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SPEAKER: Hello.
We often get questions from companies
about how to document and transfer
their API program's knowledge across attributed teams.
Enter the API Playbook.
The API Playbook is a living document
that guides the overall direction of your API program.
When we consider the digital value chain,
every aspect is an integral part of the API Playbook.
For example, how do you ensure your APIs are secure?
What processes will you have in place to connect your back end
services to your applications?
And how will you engage your community and customers
to ensure your API program is successful?
These questions and others all need to be answered.
The playbook describes your approach
to API management as a whole.
It includes the essential standards that all APIs must
follow for an organization, the best practices
for designing APIs, in a common and consumer friendly fashion,
and the essential ways of working
for API producing teams to boost quality APIs at speed
and scale.
Your playbook should focus on six key areas,
your organization, best practices, API design
decisions, development requirements, API management
and deployment processes, and overall support guidelines.
This should be a living document,
derived from industry best practices,
and best of all, experience of people inside your company.
Here's a condensed summary of various items
that will appear in a playbook.
Every business is unique.
And as a result, every API Playbook
is also unique to that business.
Let's take a closer look at the core topics and what
information you may find in each section.
In this section, APIs in your organization
explains how API governance, ownership, and federation
works.
It's important to stress who and how APIs will be managed
as well as what types of APIs are in your organization,
as well as what API teams and roles should be,
and what they do.
Your guideline and guiding principle to follow here
is as you move towards a comprehensive API program,
you should have an API first mandate from leadership.
Direct your digital product owners and API teams
to own their APIs and leverage a common infrastructure
with common design patterns that flow
throughout the entire organization.
Successful APIs require more than good technology.
You'll need to ensure your team is
equipped with the right people and processes.
Traditional development processes, or waterfall project
management, simply doesn't work when
a team has to respond to opportunities, feedback,
or problems quickly.
This section covers best practices
for organization using agile development for APIs.
Outline your software development lifecycle,
how your teams will maintain quality assurance,
and what strategies you'll focus on for mocking your data,
and how all of these ways of working might be automated.
Your guiding principle here is simple.
Successful teams are agile, nimble,
and leverage automation.
And a large enterprise, many different lines
of businesses and API teams will be producing APIs.
And it's a slippery slope of discordant design
if we don't all follow the similar guidelines.
This section details the important aspects of your API
design and helps to guide a consistent look
and feel and function of all the APIs in your catalog.
Your guiding principle, your API should be designed as products
with an outside in view, allowing
developers and consumers to easily read and understand
your data.
In the development section of your API playbook,
document how you'll facilitate security as well
as other patterns and policies which
are required in the enterprise.
Provide guidance on how user authentication will be managed
as well as any other policies for logging,
transformation, or orchestration.
These are often mandatory development guidelines
regardless of what the functionality the API exposes.
You're guiding principle here is to provide reusable shared
flows, assets, and other patterns
designed to help your API teams go to market faster.
In this section, we detailed the configurations
necessary for a successful pathway to production.
It should outline each step of your continuous integration
and delivery process and the tools used.
Furthermore, it list each environment and what
that environment is used for.
You can also include lists of analytics reports
that will help support auditing, governance, marketing,
and ongoing development.
You should also include steps to prepare
technical and non-technical documentation for the developer
portal.
Your guiding principle here is your software development
lifecycle should be tightly coupled
with continuous integration and delivery
tools that manage your APIs from coding, to deployment,
to monitoring, and analysis.
In your support section, explain how your developer portal
will be used to manage.
Discuss how you will support your community
with documentation around FAQs, troubleshooting,
support steps, and resources you might make available to them.
Investing the time to create a good resource
and support workflows will pay dividends
when it comes to both your customers
and your own organization's time.
Your guiding principle, your consumers are your customers.
And a good customer experience is a critical factor
for building useful APIs.
A thriving community will ultimately
help your API program to grow and become successful.
Hopefully, you now have a solid outline
to build your first API Playbook.
If you want more information, please check out
the community for ebooks, articles,
and other related topics.
Thank you for watching.
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