API Strategy & Practice Conference 2018

Designing APIs that will meet business objectives, attract developers, and be long-lived is a technical challenge. Typically, API teams have a vision of building a simple, secure, consistent, and well-documented API portfolio. Achieving consistency across the APIs and maintaining high quality requires a strict dedication to governance. Well established process that is objective, transparent, and manageable is crucial. Standards define what is constant across APIs; what the good citizen API is. Agreeing on what needs to be done is challenging. Making sure engineers are following the process is not an easy thing to do. This presentation outlines difficulties we faced at eBay and approaches we took to achieve consistency across our new modern RESTful APIs, all in order to deliver capabilities developers want to use.