The 3 Barriers Holding Back Your APIs
As our software systems continue to evolve and scale to meet the demands of the modern consumer and today’s enterprise, the role of APIs as fundamental building blocks has become increasingly important. More than 35 million developers have taught us that the traditional approach to API management, which emerged in the 2010s, has proven inadequate in addressing the challenges faced by engineering teams today.
Legacy API management is primarily focused on managing a single API gateway at the infrastructure level to expose data and compute resources as API endpoints. However, as organizations scale and adopt more complex architectures, this single-gateway approach no longer meets their needs. In fact, it’s becoming obsolete, as nearly a third of API publishers now use multiple gateways to manage their diverse environments.
One fundamental limitation of legacy API management is its lack of collaboration capabilities. 44% of developers rely on chat tools or email for API updates, causing delays and lost information. 39% also report inconsistent internal documentation as a significant roadblock.
Let me share a story to illustrate the pain points. I experienced this firsthand as a developer at Yahoo back in 2010. My team was building a front-end application using an internal API created by another team. As requirements evolved, this API was constantly in flux. Unfortunately, there was no central documentation, so we often had to set up meetings with the senior engineer to understand the latest changes. Sometimes, the API hadn’t even changed — it just behaved unexpectedly. All this back-and-forth caused wasted time and unnecessary meetings, often leading to broken builds in production. If we’d had a central place for collaboration, we could have avoided countless headaches and been better positioned for success. This experience highlighted a significant gap in API collaboration that legacy tools simply don’t address.
In our experience at Postman, as our platform scaled, so did the demands on our internal services to support additional products, integrations, and external-facing APIs. Most teams began by building APIs for a single use case — typically the application they worked on. However, as new consumers for these APIs emerged, engineering teams had to update existing APIs or build entirely new ones. Without collaboration in the early design stages, we found ourselves redoing things and wasting valuable engineering cycles. This experience reinforced how critical early collaboration is to successful API development.
The Downside of Legacy API Management
Legacy API management tools are primarily concerned with only APIs at the deployment stage, leaving no room for stakeholders to collaborate during the earlier stages of API development.
This results in a disjointed process in which developers are left out of the decision-making loop, stifling the potential for innovation and improvement.
As we talk to many senior engineering leaders, a common alternative they believe their developers are using is a developer portal that comes packaged with a gateway. Unfortunately, developer portals are meant to “publish” APIs after deploying an API to a gateway. Most developer portals have the bare minimum feature set to allow for obtaining an API token or seeing a list of API endpoints. They are also unidirectional, as consumers of APIs cannot actively collaborate with the publishers of the API.
This leads to APIs that don’t meet customers’ needs and slow time to market, as going through the entire development cycle from the beginning slows everyone down.
Consider a scenario where an engineering team is working on a new payment API that is supposed to be built by the engineering team and used by product teams.
Numerous tasks and discussions need to take place before a gateway even comes into the picture. These early stages involve collaboration between developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to define the API requirements, design the architecture, and ensure alignment with business objectives. However, traditional API management tools fail to provide the necessary capabilities for effective collaboration during these crucial stages, leading to a fragmented and inefficient development process.
To address this limitation, simply reimagining developer portals is not enough. Developer portals, as they exist in legacy API management, are incomplete and restricted to displaying only the deployed APIs on that specific gateway.
This gateway-centric approach hinders collaboration and limits developers’ access to the full range of APIs that are being developed or are available for consumption.
A Better Approach to API Management
A better approach is to replace these incomplete developer portals with robust and collaborative tools designed for APIs. Developers, product managers, and other stakeholders can collaborate through these purpose-built tools throughout the entire API lifecycle. This includes the early stages of API development, such as defining requirements and designing the architecture, as well as the later stages of testing and distribution.
Through effective API collaboration tools, engineering teams can break free from the limitations of gateway-centricity and empower developers to work together seamlessly. These tools should offer features such as real-time collaboration, prototyping capabilities, integrated documentation, and testing for internal team members and API consumers. With these capabilities, stakeholders can contribute their expertise and feedback throughout the API development process, resulting in higher-quality APIs and more efficient development cycles.
Through these modern tools, stakeholders can provide input at every stage of the API process, improving efficiency and reducing rework. This is precisely the collaborative approach we missed at Yahoo in 2010 — and one I now know would have saved us considerable time and frustration.
In addition to collaboration, these modern API management tools should provide a comprehensive place for all APIs within the organization. This includes encompassing all APIs, whether internal, partner-facing, or public. With a unified, searchable catalog of APIs, developers can quickly discover, explore, and consume APIs without being constrained by the limitations of a specific gateway or fragmented documentation.
Of course, these collaborative API management tools can integrate with the existing development and deployment workflows, ensuring a seamless experience for developers outside of the API building process. This integration empowers engineering teams to deliver APIs more efficiently, iterate rapidly, and respond quickly to customer needs.
Conclusion
Legacy API management, with its gateway-centric focus, lack of collaboration capabilities, and incomplete developer portals, is no longer sufficient to meet the needs of modern engineering teams. To unlock APIs’ true potential, organizations should embrace collaborative API tools that replace incomplete developer portals. These tools enable seamless collaboration, provide a comprehensive view of APIs, and drive innovation in today’s rapidly evolving software landscape.
By adopting a collaborative API development approach and empowering developers with robust tools, engineering teams can overcome legacy API management’s limitations and drive their software systems’ success in today’s environment.
