Developing Systems for API Governance

As scalable information technology evolves to a more cloud-like model, digital assets (code, data and software environments) that increasingly form the basis of research and education require curation as web-accessible services. “Serviceizing” digital assets consists of encapsulating assets in software that exposes them to web and mobile applications via welldefined, network accessible, application programming interfaces (APIs). The stability, maintenance, and lifecycle of these APIs is critical to the utility of the digital assets they serve. Our work focuses on the development methodologies and technologies for API governance – policy, implementation, and deployment functions for IT management of APIs at scale. This paper presents our view of API governance in a technology landscape that is trending towards reliance on web services. It also outlines some early results generated by our investigation of a prototype we are developing for implementing API governance at scale.