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All APIs must use standardized authentication mechanisms including OAuth, JWT, and API keys with properly defined scopes, ensuring that security is consistently implemented and that consumers have ...
All APIs must have clearly defined authorization models that control what authenticated consumers can access and perform, using role-based or attribute-based access control to ensure that permissio...
Individual APIs should be aligned with overall operational change, providing a common operational change log and road-map that is higher level than change for each individual API, but provides a co...
All APIs must have a link to the evidence of the contract validation for business and technical contracts, allowing any stakeholder to review the details of the contract, as well as the rules appli...
All data exposed through APIs must be classified by sensitivity level, with appropriate protections applied based on classification, ensuring that PII, financial data, and other sensitive informati...
API delivery must follow a design-first approach with mock servers, contract testing, and schema registries that enable parallel development, allowing consumers to begin integration before implemen...
All API-to-API dependencies must be documented and tracked, with upstream and downstream impact analysis performed before changes are made, ensuring that teams understand the ripple effects of chan...
API development must be a collaborative effort across product, engineering, and operations teams, with shared workspaces, design reviews, and cross-functional feedback loops that ensure APIs reflec...
All API error responses must follow standardized formats like RFC 7807 Problem Details, providing consistent error codes, human-readable messages, and correlation IDs that enable consumers to progr...
All API governance checks including linting, contract testing, and schema validation must be automated within the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that governance is enforced consistently at build time rat...
All OpenAPI definitions must have complete info objects including title, description, version, contact information, license, and terms of service, providing both humans and machines with the contex...
All APIs must be assessed against a maturity model that measures documentation, security, testing, monitoring, and consumer experience, providing a measurable way to track progress, compare APIs, a...
All API parameters must have clear names, descriptions, types, and constraints following consistent casing and naming conventions, with reusable parameters centralized in OpenAPI components to redu...
All API paths must conform to the overall organizational domain standards, utilizing plain language and a resourceful approach to delivering digital resources and capabilities via HTTP APIs, provid...
All API contracts must maintain a clear record of their provenance including reviews, certifications, pull requests, and change history, ensuring that the evolution of each API is traceable, audita...
All API responses should follow Internet, industry, and enterprise standards, providing a meaningful and consistent communication and structure, always providing what was intended for API consumers...
All APIs must follow a defined versioning strategy, whether semantic versioning or date-based versioning, with clear policies for how versions are communicated, how consumers are migrated, and how ...
Each API should ideally have a dedicated product as well as an engineering owner, with other stakeholders across the API lifecycle defined in an easy to access human readable location, but also def...
All APIs must be using relevant Internet, industry, and government standards available, ensuring to properly research areas of operations to see what existing standards may exist before the creatio...
All API contracts must have use cases that align the business reasons why an API is being delivered to consumers with the actual technical details of each API contract, ensuring that operations all...
All APIs should be high quality and reliable, providing adequate levels of monitoring of its availability and performance, with the proper provenance and communication with producer and consumers r...
All APIs must have human-readable documentation that defines the technical surface area of each API being made available to API consumers, providing a simple, intuitive, and ideally interactive HTM...
All APIs must be registered in a central catalog or registry with consistent metadata, tags, and descriptions, ensuring that producers and consumers can find existing APIs before building new ones,...
All APIs must follow a formal deprecation and retirement process that provides consumers with adequate notice, migration support, and a clear timeline from deprecation to removal, ensuring that no ...
All APIs must prioritize interoperability by using standard media types, hypermedia link relations, and well-known specifications, enabling consumers to integrate multiple APIs together and reducin...
All APIs must be reviewed by legal council and posses terms of service, privacy policy, licensing, and other regulatory and compliance requirements, making sure all the legal bases are covered bef...
All APIs must be deployed through a common platform gateway established for the domain, line of business, or team, leveraging development, staging, and production environments, and a common set of ...
All APIs must have comprehensive observability including monitoring, logging, health checks, and alerting, with defined SLIs and SLOs that ensure teams can proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve...
All APIs are considered and included as part of regular internal and external communication channels, sharing road maps, change logs, blog posts, videos, and other relevant information that produce...
All APIs must have abuse prevention mechanisms beyond basic rate limiting, including throttling, quotas, circuit breakers, and bot detection, ensuring the stability and availability of APIs for leg...
All APIs must prioritize the developer experience by providing interactive documentation, sandbox environments, realistic examples, and intuitive naming, ensuring that developers can quickly unders...
All APIs must demonstrate trustworthiness through transparent service level commitments, consistent deprecation policies, reliable performance, proper security, and clear legal terms, building the ...
All APIs must follow consistent design patterns for naming conventions, media types, pagination, filtering, sorting, and error handling, ensuring that consumers can learn patterns once and apply th...
All APIs must have defined business models that articulate the value exchange between producer and consumer, including pricing tiers, plan features, rate limits, and metrics, ensuring that APIs are...
All production APIs must have defined service level agreements (SLAs) that specify uptime, availability, latency, and throughput commitments for each plan tier, providing consumers with the confide...
All APIs possess a URL for humans to follow when engaging as well as the base path URL for machines to use when calling each API, ensuring that the front door for API operations within this domain ...
All APIs must be mapped to applicable regulatory and compliance requirements including GDPR, SOC2, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA, ensuring that API designs, data handling, and operations satisfy legal obligat...
All APIs being produced must be governed as part of the overall strategy, using the platform, as well as a common API lifecycle, applying policies and rules, and keeping teams moving in the same di...
All APIs must have support mechanisms to ensure API consumers have self-service or direct support channels, as well as regular feedback loops for soliciting feedback or answering specific API quest...
The components of any API should be made modular and reusable whenever it makes sense to the business use case, keeping schema, parameters, examples, error responses, and other common parts of an A...
API operations should provide dedicated workspace for domains, lines of business, and teams who are producing APIs, providing a dedicated location where work, collaboration, and automation can occu...
All APIs possess metadata that is relevant to what APIs do, but also how they can be used in business by API consumers, and metadata helps ensure that the front door for API operations within this ...
All APIs must be designed to scale efficiently as consumer traffic and data volumes grow, employing caching, pagination, filtering, and batch operations to ensure consistent performance and avoid d...
APIs that require event-driven or asynchronous communication must follow consistent standards for webhook registration, payload formats, retry policies, and delivery guarantees, enabling reliable a...
All APIs should have SDK and other client or server code available in multiple programming languages used by targeted API consumers for known business use cases, making it as simple as possible for...
All APIs are defined as API contracts so that we can align both the business and technology of delivering consistent high quality APIs, employing source control to manage the technical, but also th...
All APIs must have machine-readable artifacts that defines the technical surface area of each API being made available to API consumers, utilizing open-source community specifications like OpenAPI ...
All changes to APIs must be evaluated for breaking impact before release, with breaking changes requiring explicit approval, version increments, migration guides, and proactive consumer communicati...
All APIs must have change management baked into the definition, delivery, and iteration, ensuring that producers and consumers are in alignment regarding the communication, quality, and velocity of...
The schema for data that is sent and received via API should always be well-defined, possess a well-known shape, and always be validated, ensuring that digital resources and capabilities are what t...
API operations is made easier by making common elements like documentation, authentication, SDKs easy to find and available as just a couple of simple steps that API consumers can follow when it co...
Individual API operations should always be properly secured during design, develop, and run-time, making sure data, credentials, logs, and all other related resources are properly secured and opera...
All individual API operations must be useful and follow consistent Internet, industry, and enterprise standards, providing a simple and relevant HTTP API operation that does one thing and does it w...
All APIs must have a single source of truth for all artifacts, as well as the conversations and always be able to be delivered using a repeatable process, leveraging existing software development i...
