Event-driven systems introduce unique challenges for API governance, compared to governing traditional request/response APIs. Their high velocity, evolving schemas, and distributed ownership mean that governance needs to be purpose-developed for your event-driven architecture. If not, you’re likely to run into issues that compromise interoperability, model performance, and compliance, as well as stacking up problems downstream for your data teams.
We’re here to help you plan proactively for successful event-driven API governance, by looking at common causes of governance strategy failure and how you can avoid them.
Reasons that event-driven API governance fails – and what you can do about it
Event-driven APIs are foundational for enabling real-time data flows, with a huge range of use cases. Yet underestimating their complexity, lacking the right tooling or misalignment between your teams can lead to fragmented governance, outages and breaking changes. To avoid this, bear in mind the following when governing your event-driven APIs.
Don’t rely on your REST governance strategy and tooling
Applying governance models designed for request/response APIs won’t work. They don’t take account of event-driven APIs’ unique characteristics (message ordering, delivery semantics, multi-subscriber coordination and the like). As such, don’t rely on the governance strategy and tools you implemented for your REST APIs; you need a fresh governance approach for your event-driven architecture.
Focus on your schema registry
Without a centralized schema registry, your event-driven API governance is doomed to fail. You’ll end up with inconsistencies and version chaos. Head this off by having a schema registry with enforced versioning policies, so that you can keep everything in order.
Engage your people from the outset
One of the key messages in our recently published ebook – The enterprise architect’s guide to universal API governance – is that API governance is about people. Fail to engage your teams in governance and you’re setting yourself up to fail.
If you don’t engage your people, you’ll end up with inconsistent usage and adoption of your event-driven APIs. This results in governance silos, fragmented documentation, lack of clarity around event ownership and responsibility for schema updates, and a whole range of other issues. To avoid the delays, confusion, frustrations and API outages that this can cause, engage your people with your governance strategy from the outset. Be clear around ownership, stewardship and responsibilities. Plus, make it easy for developers to self-serve and use your event-driven APIs consistently, with well-documented APIs available through a developer portal.
Be proactive, not reactive
If you create event-driven APIs with loosely defined or undocumented contracts, your governance will end up being reactive rather than proactive – hardly a strong foundation for long-term governance success. What’s more, the longer you run with such a situation, the harder it becomes to unpick. To avoid this, ensure you treat event definitions as first-class design artifacts (rather than implementation details) during your API design phase. Get your house in order before you scale, rather than reacting to issues afterwards.
Plan your API lifecycles properly
Event-driven APIs need proper version control and deprecation policies, just as other APIs do. Failure to attend properly to lifecycle planning means you can end up with compatibility issues and downstream consumption complications for your data teams and for services integrated with your event-driven APIs. To avoid this, ensure your governance strategy covers the full API lifecycle, not just part of it.
Think about CI/CD pipeline integration
Poor integration with CI/CD pipelines can result in your governance strategy breaking down, as API contracts (schemas, documentation, metadata) aren’t integrated into the development lifecycle. The results of this range from schema drift to undocumented breaking changes. In other words, a major governance failure. As such, you need to think about CI/CD integration from an early stage of developing your event-driven API governance strategy, then choose appropriate tooling to enable this.
The benefits of successful event-driven API governance
Avoiding these common causes of failure will do much to set your event-driven API governance strategy on the path to success. With appropriate governance in place, you can strengthen API security and support seamless compliance journeys while enjoying operational benefits such as enhanced efficiency and faster release cycles.
A failing governance strategy undermines enterprise-wide trust in your real-time operations and negatively impacts customer experiences. Conversely, building a governance strategy that accounts for scale and event-driven API complexity from day one can grow trust and support you to achieve your business goals.
If you’re integrating your event-driven architecture with your AI model, strong governance can help avoid models breaking when exposed to ungoverned or changed event formats. It can also prevent the duplication or missing events undermining real-time decisions, even as it makes auditing and compliance smoother by making it easier to trace input data.
By getting your governance strategy right and molding it around the unique requirements of your event-driven API architecture, you can minimize fragmented data and unpredictable model behavior, reducing your operational risk while getting the best from your APIs.
Read more about API governance in an event-driven world to ensure your strategy is on track. You can also dive into the practicalities of governing your event-driven APIs by exploring the powerful capabilities of Tyk Streams.
