There are many different ways in which you can answer the seemingly simple question: "What is an API?"
Previous discussions focused on the technical fundamentals ("it has to be networked and reusable") and on the bigger picture ("it’s a delivery mechanism for a product").
The term API Platform has been used synonymously by some vendors with API Management, Full Lifecycle API Management, and even the term API Gateway. Everyone loves to spice up a subject with the word platform but being loose with the term is cutting the subject short. What is an API Platform? An API Platform is all these things and more.
An API Platform’s purpose is to serve net new application development — building new capabilities, new experiences, nurturing ecosystems, and more. API Management, Full Lifecycle API Management, and API Gateways are tables stakes here of course. These bring life to API design and development, to lifecycle management, to policy and security enforcement, to analytics and to nurturing development communities as consumers of these APIs. All critical.
The Complexity of API DiscoveryI can’t get API discovery out of my mind. Partly because I am investing significant cycles in this area at work, but it is also something I have been thinking about for so long that it is difficult to move on. It remains one of the most complex, challenging, and un-addressed aspects of the way the web is working (or not working) online today. I feel pretty strongly that there hasn’t been an investment in the area of API discovery because most technology companies providing and consuming APIs prefer things to be un-discoverable, for a variety of conscious and unconscious reasons behind these belief systems.
One of the reasons that API discovery does not evolve in any significant way is because there is not any real clarity on what API discovery is. Depending on who you are and what your role in the technology sector is, you’ll define API discovery in a variety of ways. There are a handful of key actors that contribute to the complexity of defining and optimizing in the area of API discovery.
