What are best API Management practices?

Tue Oct 26 2021

2 min read

APIs have become crucial for business development stacks since they provide a way to communicate between client and server or other applications. Your company’s growth directly influences its tech infrastructure, and this, in turn, affects the size of your APIs. So you must follow some best practices for managing your APIs.

What is API Management?

API management is the practice of overseeing all aspects of the APIs that your enterprise uses. It includes but is not limited to providing different ways of building APIs, making them accessible for all users, monitoring and analyzing their usage, reporting performance metrics, and securing access so only authenticated users can use them.

Let’s take a look at some of the API management practices that you should follow.

API Availability

Your APIs are acting as messengers between your servers, and if they are down, your whole business can go down with it. So you need to ensure that your API is available at all times and see as little downtime as reasonably possible.

Provide API Support

One of the essential API management practices is providing quality support for your APIs to developers. You should also provide as many options as possible so developers can fully utilize the power of your API.

Provide Reliability

Your APIs must be reliable; otherwise, no one is going to use them. You can do this by ensuring you are pulling the data from reliable sources or providing an endpoint that does not crash as the traffic increases.

API Security

If your APIs are not secure, no one is going to use them. You also need to ensure that your company’s internal APIs are secure; otherwise, your data will be vulnerable to outside threats. You can use different techniques like rate-limiting, authentication, input validation, and adding a fail-safe to add additional security layers within your API.