Applying standards to your API environment

Up to now, we have discussed the governance process for organizing and managing your API lifecycle, including roles and permissions, approvals, and environment setup. These are all critical to the governance process, but they are mostly enforced by the initial configuration of your API Connect environment. That is, once you decide on how to implement these, and configure your installation appropriately, the restrictions put in place will enforce the rules. As you know, your API factory is a living and ever-changing cycle. Over time, you will be creating new APIs and changing existing ones. As this happens, there are certain aspects of the configuration that are not as easily controlled. These are the standards that should be established, monitored, and enforced to make your API organization a success.

As we have mentioned before, API creation is very different from our old application development where we could just develop some code or...