4 Essential Tips to Building a Unified API Design

Updated on October 19, 2020

HTTP-centric API design breaks everything when you introduce other implementations, so we asked API expert Mike Amundsen to help us work around the issue.

As APIs are adopted in more and more organizations, the need for successful API design and implementation becomes more pressing. Companies that adopt a single API definition format (OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Schema Definition Language, Protobuff, etc.) are likely to find their options limited as their API ecosystem grows and matures over time.

In order to avoid forcing the entire company to adopt a single API style or format, no matter the requirements of providers and consumers, we need a unified API design process. One that doesn’t pre-determine implementation details such as REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and others.

We asked the ultimate API expert Mike Amundsen to help us work around these issues.

Mike came back to us with a method for unifying API design.

Based on materials in Design and Build Great Web APIs, Mike’s talk describes a simple, repeatable process for API designers to capture and document design details in a way that allows API developers to make their own decisions on which API style best fits the needs of the company and the consumer.

Here are a few of the main takeaways: