Flexibility, reusability, consistency and a happy team of internal developers… What’s not to love about OpenAPI Specification for API platform governance? If you’re ready to scale, govern and optimise your API platform efficiently, it’s time to embark on an OpenAPI Specification (OAS) journey.
The benefits of OAS for API platform management
OAS is a vendor-neutral open standard specification for APIs that you can use to drive standard API development best practice across your organisation. Supported by a large range of tools, it gives your internal development teams the flexibility to create APIs how they wish. At the same time, it follows opinionated and reusable specification guidance and API deployment pipelines, so that you can ensure secure yet efficient API development at scale throughout your business.
Added to this blend of flexibility and consistency is reusability. OAS serves as an API documentation standard – it is a single source of truth in your organisation. This delivers efficiency that can reduce costs by making your APIs easier to discover and reuse.
With this opinionated framework in place, your internal developers can create APIs that adhere to your prescribed formats, including generating OpenAPI descriptions from your source code. They can also validate APIs against your internal OAS best practice and internal security standards, ensuring everything is neat, secure and efficient.
Scaling your API platform with OAS
Implementing OAS provides your internal developers with a framework for API design best practice. It enables you to provide best practice documentation centrally through your API platform, to support your developers and wider teams to craft APIs more quickly and easily.
As part of your wider API platform strategy, using OAS as your single source of truth can ensure your developers are happy and benefitting from your platform. It can also drive adoption of your platform tooling, for example by enabling you to provide well documented API specification examples and overviews and/or walkthroughs of the standardised API development journey (and tooling).
All of this makes it easier for your internal developers to create APIs in adherence with your defined standards, saving them time and headaches and showcasing the value of your API platform.
Using OAS for superior governance
Using Tyk API Gateway with OAS provides an easy example of how you can achieve superior governance. You can version, secure and test OAS APIs through the gateway, ensuring they conform to your platform standards.
By providing reusable, pre-defined elements using OAS, you can enable developers adding OAS APIs to your Tyk Gateway to build on top of these globally defined standard OAS contract definition elements. This delivers consistency while still enabling developers to edit sections to their specific needs, achieving a degree of efficient governance that benefits all concerned. It also means that you can check OAS APIs being integrated and deployed prior to commits, to preemptively flag any potential error-causing or contract-breaking issues.
Taking OAS benefits beyond your internal team
When it comes to optimising your platform and its benefits, OAS can take the advantages beyond your internal team. You can use automated synchronisation between your internal documentation to ensure that APIs surfaced in the Tyk Developer Portal adhere to your external-facing API documentation standards. The result? A best-in-class external developer experience for those seeking to consume your APIs.
Tyk support for OAS
Tyk introduced native support for OAS back in 2022. Open standards and open source have always been a core part of our DNA, so enabling our users to achieve faster time to value and enhanced developer productivity made total sense.
Fast-forward to the present day and our OAS feature maturity provides you with everything you need to scale, govern and optimise your API platform with ease, as you support your developers with OAS along their journey.
Why not chat with the Tyk team to find out more?
