The API Specification Conference – ASC 2022 – is being held in person from September 19 – 21 in South San Francisco! OpenAPI Initiative’s API Specifications Conference (ASC) is a place for API practitioners and enthusiasts to come together and discuss the evolution of API technologies. The OpenAPI Specification, RAML, Blueprint, gRPC, OData, JSON Schema, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, and other formats will all be topics, enabling attendees to get familiar with these formats and discuss how to use them in practice.
ASC includes cutting-edge technology keynotes and sessions that chart the future of APIs with in-depth specification and standards discussions. This year’s first announced keynote is presented by Jean Yang, CEO of Akita Software. Jean is the founder and CEO of Akita Software, a developer tools company building “one-click” observability. Previously, Jean was a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She has a Ph.D. from MIT, holds software tools patents from work at Microsoft Research and Facebook, and was selected as one of the MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2016.
The event is designed to be highly interactive with plenty of discussion time throughout the workshops and sessions!
The lineup of early bird talks is also being announced and includes presentations from:
Erez Yalon, Checkmarx, Evolution of the API Security Top 10
Jeremy Glassenberg, Docusign, Setting Standards and Create Smooth API Implementations
Brian Terlson, Microsoft, Developing API-First Multi-Protocol Services with Cadl
The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on evolving and implementing the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), is announcing today that Kubeshop.io has joined as a new member. Kubeshop’s CTO, Ole Lensmar, served as the chairman of the OpenAPI Initiative from its inception in 2016 until 2020. We welcome back the familiar face!
Kubeshop is an open-source accelerator/incubator focused on Kubernetes (“K8s”). Kubeshop identifies needs and offers resources and guidance to projects within the k8s space, specifically focusing on helping Developers, Testers, and DevOPS engineers with tooling that strives to make complex workflows simpler and more productive. Currently, Kubeshop is home to Kusk, Kubtest, and Monokle:
Kusk allows users to work with an OpenAPI specification as the source of truth for Kubernetes manifests, simplifying cluster configuration and management across a number of popular Kubernetes Ingress Controllers
Kubtest provides a framework for testing of applications and APIs running under Kubernetes, allowing teams to decouple test orchestration and execution from ci/cd tooling and centralize test-result management and analysis
Monokle simplifies everyday tasks and workflows related to management and debugging of k8s manifests
“Joining and supporting the OAI was an obvious step for us; the OAI is central to the continued adoption and evolution of the OpenAPI Specification, and we are excited about the prospect of housing projects targeting OpenAPI specific needs and Kubernetes workflows,” said Ole Lensmar, CTO, Kubeshop.
We look forward to watching Kubeshop grow and evolve, and help out k8s developers!
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
The OpenAPI Initiative welcomes apiplatform.io, a productivity management platform that allows users to build and manage backend applications with no code. With apiplatform.io, users can create and host fully functional workflows and APIs to move legacy databases to the cloud.
apiplatform boasts an extensive client list including Lamico Systems and Site Lantern.
apiplatform allows users to go from idea to product quickly. Thanks to their fully automated but highly configurable model, databases can be efficiently migrated according to the OpenAPI Specification (OAS). By allowing users to modernize databases with speed, apiplatform lessens user costs without sacrificing quality.
We sat down with co-founder and CEO Muthu Raju to learn more about what apiplatform is currently working on, and why they joined the OpenAPI Initiative.
Why are you joining the OpenAPI Initiative, and why now?
At apiplatform.io, we automate all the steps in the API development cycle so that our users can achieve integration and digital transformation at speed. We automate API generation and deployment based on API Specification provided as input to our platform.
The OpenAPI Initiative is focused on creating and promoting a vendor-neutral description format. Therefore, we feel OpenAPI Initiative is the right place to collaborate and arrive at a description format for building business logic, workflows, and continuous automation in our platform.
In your mission statement, you talk about eliminating technology barriers. How are you doing this?
We automate the developer lifecycle processes for a given API Specification by generating the code for the specification, testing and deploying them to a cloud platform, and setting up a gateway for secured access control. So, the end-user doesn’t need to understand how to use the tools, platforms, services, and technologies to operationalize their API or invest their time in coding, setting up the continuous delivery pipeline, etc. One can jump from design to delivery of API for a given specification!
apiplatform.io developed the Covid19 Virtual Assistant to help people find and use COVID-19 data. How does it work, and how does someone access it?
https://covid19.apiplatform.io/ was developed and deployed in early 2020 by integrating the COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) along with a Virtual Assistant “GOVID” to assist people looking for food, medicine, online consultation, etc. This Virtual Assistance was helping people until the Indian Government authorized only a few private and government bodies to host such services during the pandemic.
What’s important about the new OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0 for apiplatform.io? What are the challenges for broader adoption?
OpenAPI Specification, be it 3.1.0 or any other version, will be the primary specification supported by apiplatform.io which means we automate the development lifecycle of API based on the specification. Therefore, we don’t foresee any challenge as such for the broader adoption.
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Welcome to APIAddicts! APIAddicts boasts one of the largest communities of API practitioners with an extensive international presence in Spanish-speaking countries including Spain, Perú and México with 5,000+ APIAddicts worldwide, and over a million visualizations.
APIAddicts hosts multiple events throughout the year for developers wanting to discuss, learn more, and contribute to the growth and integration of APIs. Many details are provided in the interview below. APIAddicts Days is one of the most important events hosted by them annually. Companies and professionals share their experiences while analyzing the successes and failures in the current framework that supports API. To find out how APIAddicts Days was in 2020, click here.
APIAddicts has a strong education focus. Their School of API’s aims at helping professionals improve their use of APIs. At the end of the courses, you are awarded an API Evangelist Certificate / Recognition / Diploma.
We wanted to learn more about their upcoming events and the latest updates in the API world, and what working with the OpenAPI Initiative would look like. We talked to Marco Antonio Sanz, founder of APIAddicts, to find out more!
How was APIAddicts born?
In 2013 five very techie friends and colleagues were working in large companies managing APIs and realized a lack of APIs documentation and education in Spanish at that moment.
So they started giving a series of informal talks to share their knowledge. Meetup groups were created, which are still active today, to connect with other people interested in digital transformation and we started to meet monthly to talk about news or updates in the sector, actually the first meetings were in a bar in Getafe, until it was gradually formalized.
This was growing and finally formed what today is APIAddicts, the largest Spanish-speaking community around APIs with more than 5,000 APIAddicts in Spain, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
How hard is it to get an API Evangelist Diploma? What are the main benefits?
The evangelization of APIs and the training of professionals in it is so important, so from the Foundation we wanted to go a step further and help companies to qualify their teams with the most updated knowledge and from the best experts.
We had already been doing the API Owner course for years, which is in great popular demand today, and we decided to complete the training with the specialization courses in Security, Testing, Design and Architecture. This way you can get an overview of the entire APIfication process of a company and learn how to manage each of these phases optimally.
All the courses involve a total training of 50 hours with 80% of hands-on practice where students can apply the knowledge they have learned. Once the courses are finished, they present an API project to the teachers, who evaluate and assess the documentation.
If they achieve the API project taking into account the requirements and concepts of the courses, they obtain the certifications of each specialty and the API Evangelist Diploma, the highest certification for an API professional.
Nowadays there are many companies that trust in the courses of the API School of the Foundation and with them they specialize their teams, PM, QA, Technical Lead, Analysts, Coordinators… Taking these courses guarantees you knowledge in the whole APIfication process and a clear management of the necessary tools. This not only increases your job projection but also your career within the companies.
What is APIAddicts mission in the evangelization of APIs?
We have always been aware that, although APIs are a key factor in companies that want to be competitive today, it is a term that generates a lot of confusion. Therefore, we could say that the APIAddicts Foundation’s evangelizing mission began in 2013 when APIs were already being used but no one fully understood what they were for. In fact, the role of our community has been essential to introduce the transformative potential of APIs in Spain.
In this sense, we carry out annual studies, Open Source tools, training courses, 3 large events: Webseries, Startups and APIs and APIAddicts Days and more than 20 annual meetups. We are the community that has created more API documentation in Spanish and now we hope to continue doing so with OpenAPI.
We believe that if we had to define what our main differentiation is, it would be that we always try to have the best referents of the sector to inspire in the use of APIs and always from a close treatment, being a real community. That is why, for example, all our API School courses are not recorded because for us this makes you lose an essential part of the API training: sharing experiences and real cases with the live expert.
Finally, every day, and more and more strongly, we continue to do what we were born for: to bring the knowledge of APIs to every Spanish-speaking corner of the world, in a disruptive way.
What is the relationship between APIAddicts and CloudAPPI?
After starting the evangelization of APIs through talks and meetups, the community was gaining popularity and with it came business opportunities. This became a turning point in which they decided to leave their usual jobs to set up their own consulting firm, outside the bases of the association, because on one side runs the foundation and on the other the company, but they could accompany each other as partners in their growth, both approaching the life cycle of the APIs from different points of view.
Therefore, today the relationship between both entities is based on sponsorship, so they actively participate in different events. However, the Foundation supports itself with its own budget thanks to the other sponsors, courses of the API School and prices of some of the tickets for our events.
We always had it clear, the Foundation was born altruistically by a group of teckie friends who love APIs to promote the knowledge of APIs in Spanish and will always remain so.
Why did APIAddicts join OpenAPI Initiative and why now?
In these last few years we have been trying to take API Evangelism further in all formats: Open Source tools, international events, new broadcasting formats such as podcasts, specialization courses… Within all of this, we saw the need to be part of a development community as essential for the future of APIs as the OpenAPI Initiative.
This way we can offer added value to our community and increase the role of the Foundation in the future of APIs. We want to help to improve the specification and thus improve the level of the tools that allow the implementation of API First methodologies, such as API Tools.
We enjoyed hearing from the APIAddicts team and learning about the fantastic work they are doing. We appreciate the value they place in community building and vocalizing the needs of the API community.
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) is looking for three individuals to fill three separate year-long contracts to help lead the conversation around the leading API specification. We are looking for three self-starting individuals who are familiar with the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), and will help roll up their sleeves and help move a handful of projects forward.
The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) has emerged as the leading way to describe the surface area of your APIs in the last five years, and the need for help to support the community has grown dramatically. As part of this growth we’ve identified a few priority projects we are managing using Github Projects, and would love to get you involved!
Projects
Here is a list of the current projects OAI members and community have prioritized, which we have also tagged by the type of work involved, shared a brief description of what is involved, and provided a link to the Kanban board for each project.
OpenAPI Search Engine Optimization (Marketing) – Ongoing work to help improve the search engine optimization for the OAI and OAS, helping elevate the presence of the specification.
New Member Identification & Engagement (Marketing, Community, Business Development) – Work to identify potential new members to the OAI and reach out to them to help start a conversation and make them aware of the benefits of being a member.
Member Showcase & Engagement (Marketing, Community, Business Development) – Continually improving how we showcase and engage with the members of the OAI, and increase their participation within the OAS community.
Profile & Engage with API Providers (Community, Business Development) – Work to identify, profile, and build relationships with API providers who have implemented the OpenAPI specification, and publish profile to a central database.
Profile and Engage with Open Source Tooling (Marketing, Community, Business Development) – Establish an official directory of open source tooling that uses OAS, and actively work to establish and build relationships with each tooling provider to get them more involved in the community.
Business Sector Showcase & Engagement (Business Development) – Work to profile business sectors that are putting OpenAPI to work, then engage, and build relationships with individuals or organizations, while helping stimulate OAI special interest groups in these areas.
All of these positions require leadership qualities to help define, prioritize, and execute on plans, and to engage with the OpenAPI community to increase participation, member value, and drive overall community energy.pods
Contract Details
These are the details of the work, with more details available upon request:
3 Individual Part-Time Contractors
One Year Contract from September 15th 2021 through Sept 15th, 2022)
These are the basic requirements for being considered for the contract positions:
OpenAPI Awareness
Project Management Skills
Writing and Editing Skills
Enjoys Working with People
Embraces values of collaboration, inclusion, and diversity
Contract Pitch
When applying for one of the contracts, please pitch us on which project or projects your skills are a match for accomplishing, and demonstrate why you would be our choice to help not just make a project happen, but help us lead where the project goes next.
How to Apply
Please email your cover letter, resume, and any questions to jobs@openapis.org by August 15th, 2021 to be considered for the positions by the OAI hiring committee, with a start date of September 15th, 2021.
Get Involved
Even if you aren’t interested in submitting for any of these job postings we encourage you to get involved in the community and help out on any of these projects. In addition to participating as part of the weekly technical and marketing meetings, the OAI is looking for help across these projects, writing blog posts, and creation of educational materials, so please feel free to reach out via social channels or email to get involved.
RapidAPI is joining the OpenAPI Initiative! RapidAPI helps developers find, manage, and test APIs. They provide an API Marketplace for developers to discover and connect to thousands of public APIs. The company’s services can be tailored to a company’s brand, to build private marketplaces for internal and external APIs. Notable enterprise clients include SAP, Cisco, Tata, and Hyatt.
To learn more about RapidAPI Marketplace, sign up for a free account here.
To better understand how RapidAPI provides a next-generation infrastructure for APIs and what a collaboration with the OpenAPI Initiative would mean for them, we asked Iddo Gino, CEO and Founder.
Why did RapidAPI join the OpenAPI Initiative, and why now?
APIs are the heart and soul of RapidAPI. With acquisitions like the Paw Client and unique developer tools such as RapidAPI Testing — we care deeply about the developer experience of writing, publishing, and ultimately maintaining APIs. OpenAPI plays a significant role in all of this.
Our goal in joining the OpenAPI Initiative is to give back to the community. As we build the next-generation of API Developer Tooling, it’s more important than ever to be part of the API builders’ community conversations. OAI is where API builders and API consumers go beyond the original spec to collaborate on exciting things such as JSON Schema and Asynchronous APIs and beyond. RapidAPI wants to help advance the specification through participation in the community.
Additionally, we’re committed to making our platform easily interface with 3rd party tools. Therefore, it’s important for us to continually support the OpenAPI Specification format, allow interconnectivity of all tools, and avoid customer lock-in.
The RapidAPI team has a history of participation in development communities. Our Head of DevRel Ahmad Awais is an active voting member of the Node.js Community Committee and WordPress Foundation Core Contributor before that. Our Head of Marketing, Suzanne Panoplos, has been active in the Open Container Initiative and CNCF. As you can see, joining the OpenAPI Initiative and becoming a member of the Linux Foundation couldn’t be a more natural transition for RapidAPI.
What goes into making an API marketplace? What makes one better than the other?
A robust API marketplace enables developers to find, connect and manage APIs from a single place and support a variety of APIs including REST, SOAP, GraphQL or Asynchronous APIs. For each API you should be able to see performance metrics like average latency, uptime, and popularity and be able to test the API from the browser.
Additionally, a marketplace should enable you to:
Gather information about each API using the endpoints page to view a list of endpoints, documentation, and a code snippet to help you implement the code into your app.
Subscribe to API plans to start using it. Manage all your API subscriptions and payments through a single source.
Utilize a single key for all your APIs.
Manage applications and API keys using a single dashboard. Using this dashboard, you should be able to:
Monitor API performance by visualizing how many requests are made to different APIs, tracking the number of requests that return an error, and viewing latency data for each API.
Debug faster by inspecting the logs for all requested data.
View usage and billing information for a breakdown of API spending, including the monthly recurring and overage charges.
Manage subscriptions from one place including quota usage and time remaining until the quota limit resets.
How has COVID affected the use of APIs in the past year?
With the pandemic, digitalization has gone from being a “nice to have” to an imperative to survival. Take Starbucks as an example. Before the pandemic, 7% of Starbucks revenue came from mobile ordering. During the pandemic, 100% of their revenue came from mobile ordering as most stores were closed to in-person ordering.
To react to the changing environment during the pandemic, companies had to adjust their application development process and accelerate their delivery to address changing market conditions. To do so, companies have to rely on APIs in their software development.
This trend is true across almost all industries during the pandemic. Still, there has been an explosion of API usage in healthcare settings, where services, appointments, and scheduling have taken place online to the homebound consumption of services such as food ordering, retail, etc.
This trend was highlighted in RapidAPI’s 2020 Developer Survey, released earlier this year. The survey indicated that developer reliance on APIs accelerated during the pandemic and will continue to increase in 2021.The data revealed that 61% of developers used more APIs in 2020 than in 2019, and 71% plan to use even more during the upcoming year.
What’s your vision for API marketplaces 1-3 years out?
As API proliferation continues to increase across all organizations, enterprises will find it to be a necessity for finding, connecting to and managing their APIs. Marketplaces will need to provide:
An Open Platform – With organizations using disparate API gateways, marketplaces will offer a platform for integrating with multiple different gateways and clouds.
Developer Experience – Marketplaces will need to be continually developer-first, providing the key features needed to deliver API use and reuse such as deep search and tagging API analytics for providers or consumers, and advanced usage controls for developers.
Out of the box experience – Marketplaces will need to have everything developers need to succeed including advanced features such deep search, end user analytics, and developer registration workflows.
Many-to-Many Model – Marketplaces will need to support multiple teams of API providers offering APIs to internal consumers as well as partners and customers.
Support for All API Types – Marketplaces should support all of the last APIs including SOAP, REST, GraphQL, Async APIs like Kafka, and more.
Scalability – Marketplaces should scale to support hundreds of APIs with room for future growth.
Governance – Marketplaces will unify visibility and governance across all APIs in the organization, regardless of which clouds or API gateways are in use.
We are excited to welcome RapidAPI to our list of growing members and look forward to working closely together!
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
BetterCloud is joining the OpenAPI Initiative! BetterCloud is a SaaS management platform (SMP) that provides IT professionals with a solution to discover, manage and secure the growing stack of SaaS applications in their digital workplace. The driving force behind BetterCloud is to ensure organizations get the transformative value and benefits of adopting SaaS applications, while ensuring IT has complete control over their environment and can serve as an enabler for the business.
BetterCloud helps manage SaaS data and creates custom, automated workflows, you can monitor and operate with a centralized admin console. To request a demo, click here.
We talked with BetterCloud to understand how SaaSOps works, its future and what becoming a member of the OpenAPI Initiative would mean for them.
What is SaaSOps and what size companies should evaluate SaaSOps?
Response from Jamie Tischart, CTO
SaaSOps is a practice referring to how software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are discovered, managed, and secured through centralized and automated operations (Ops), resulting in reduced friction, improved collaboration, and better employee experience.
SaaSOps can be divided into three categories. The starting point is SaaS discovery, which involves understanding what applications exist within your SaaS environment. Next is SaaS Management, which addresses what IT needs to ensure proper onboarding / offboarding procedure, access management, spend management and more. The third category is SaaS Security, which focuses on data protection; specifically incident response, file security, identity and access, and regulatory compliance.
SaaSOps can be implemented by any company, regardless of size. Mid- to large-size companies tend to have more complex SaaS stacks, and therefore are more likely to embrace SaaSOps in order to manage and protect their SaaS environments.
Where will SaaSOps be in 2-3 years?
From Jamie Tischart, CTO
We are going to see explosive growth in the coming years as companies embrace more and more best-in-breed SaaS applications. The larger and more complex a company’s stack, the more IT needs robust practices in place to discover, manage and secure those applications. We’ve already seen a surge in demand for SaaSOps professionals since the start of the pandemic, and we expect that to continue growing.
Why is BetterCloud joining the OpenAPI Initiative and why now?
Response from Brian Miller, Senior Staff Engineer
Given we hadn’t known an insider until now—thank you Lorinda Brandon—it never dawned on us to explore joining as a possibility. We are delighted to help and grow the community and make the OpenAPI community more of a de facto standard within the SaaSOps world.
Response from Lomesh Patel, Software Architect
In addition to Brian’s response above, we’re interested in defining an API standard for integrating with a SaaSOps platform and we’re looking at OpenAPI as a foundation for that.
Have you implemented OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0? What advice do you have for companies evaluating it?
From Brian Miller, Senior Staff Engineer
Implementation is a loaded word. Are we going to implement it for documenting internal and external apis? Yes! We have already done that at a certain level, but more importantly we are using OAS as a foundation to expand and define what it means to manage your SaaSOps integration.
From Lomesh Patel, Software Architect
Our advice for companies evaluating Specification 3.1.0 would be to standardize all of their API (both internal and external) definitions and documentation using OpenAPI and to develop all their product features with API-first approach.
Welcome BetterCloud! Very pleased to have you as part of the OpenAPI Initiative!
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Customer base already heavily utilizing OpenAPI Specification, Checkly “doubling down” on open source with increased contributions to projects like Headless Recorder and monitoring-as-code
SAN FRANCISCO – April 27, 2021 – The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on creating, evolving and promoting the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), a vendor-neutral, open description format for RESTful APIs, is announcing today that Checkly has joined as a new member.
Checkly provides a monitoring and testing platform for developers and modern DevOps teams. The Berlin-based company’s cloud platform allows developers to monitor their API endpoints and web apps. Customers can configure fully-fledged HTTP requests with flexible assertions and setup/teardown scripts. To monitor web apps, Checkly runs JavaScript and open-source powered browser checks.The company has also developed the open source Headless Recorder for creating end-to-end testing scripts through a Chrome extension. As a critical initiative, Checkly’s focus is on monitoring-as-code enabled through its public API.
“We are very excited to join the OpenAPI Initiative. Our customers and we are benefitting from standardized APIs. OpenAPI enables our customers to get their API monitoring setup started easily and therefore provides immense benefits in flexibility and openness,” said Hannes Lenke, CEO at Checkly. “We see the opportunity to contribute to the initiative through our day-to-day experiences and want to connect with key players in the field to discuss ideas and network. In 2021 we want to double down on OSS and as part of the initiative joined OpenAPI as we see as a great and natural fit.”
“With the growth of DevOps and microservices, API usage has skyrocketed. Monitoring and testing is key in modern production environments, and OpenAPI documents can really help with the authoring process,” said Marsh Gardiner, Product Manager, Google, and Technical Steering Committee, OpenAPI Initiative. “We look forward to Checkly’s support of the OpenAPI Specification moving forward.”
Checkly raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Accel. Angel investors Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic, Zeit CEO Guillermo Rauch and former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, also participated in early funding. For more information, please visit https://www.checklyhq.com/. To learn how to learn how to simplify API monitoring with OpenAPI specs and Checkly visit: https://www.checklyhq.com/guides/openapi-swagger/
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
Level 250 is joining the OpenAPI Initiative! Level 250 is a consulting organization that helps companies large and small improve their Product Strategies around SaaS, APIs and Developer-focused Tools: https://www.level250.com
Level 250 is run by Emmanuel Paraskakis, who has over 20 years of far-reaching experience in Product Management in organizations ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. Paraskakis was VP of Product Management for two of the most important API products in the world: Apiary with API Blueprint (acquired by Oracle) and SwaggerHub (and the Swagger Open Source toolset) which uses OpenAPI.
With that extensive API and product background, we asked Paraskakis about Level 250, implementing the new OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0, and where APIs are headed. We found out about how the requirements of API builders and API consumers are converging, about major improvements in reuse that will help managing scale, helping non-humans (yes), and a lot more!
— Why did Level 250 join OpenAPI Initiative and Why Now?
I have always been involved in OpenAPI, with two previous member companies, Apiary and SmartBear and so it’s part of my background. APIs and OpenAPI are at the center of everything we do at Level 250, so I want to continue to support OpenAPI in any way I can.
What makes this even more relevant today is that OpenAPI is becoming so much more that just one Spec: it’s the place where thinking and collaboration around APIs happens, whether it’s about the original OpenAPI spec, or adjacent specs such as JSON Schema and AsyncAPI, and beyond. I think OAI is becoming a focal point where the requirements of API builders and API consumers are converging. Exciting times!
— What’s the biggest issue with implementing the OpenAPI Specification?
I think the Spec is a wonderful interchange format, a Lingua Franca that most API Tools speak, so you can for example take a document that was meant as a design and reuse it to configure your API Management or your Security tests.
But because it’s become complex, encompassing many use cases, I think it’s difficult to learn and I also think it’s hard to write, for the Design-first use case for example. There are tools that make the process easier, with syntax suggestions or even UI editors, but the underlying complexity remains.
I’d love to see a simpler language that could be written by hand, perhaps leveraging examples, during the ideation and design process, and that could then translate directly into the current Spec for interoperability.
Beyond that, I think we could work more on making modularity and composition easier and also the handling of metadata, discovery and runtime configuration of API Gateways.
— Who should use the OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0?
I think the most exciting news is the full JSON Schema compatibility and support of the latest 2020-12 draft! This allows anyone to describe data structures in more detail and enhances compatibility with external tooling.
Another huge win will be for folks that need to describe Webhooks and they’ve been requesting this for some time.
One of the changes that doesn’t seem to get talked about much is the fact that you don’t _need_ to have a top-level `paths` element, you can just describe `components` and that’s still a valid OpenAPI document. That’s a huge step forward for reuse. So anyone who has lots of OpenAPI documents and is experiencing the pain of repeating information with all the problems that attracts, should be making the jump to 3.1.
— What’s your vision for the future API stack 1-3 years out?
The main problems being encountered today on the API provider side are those of managing scale and decreasing time to market, so I think Specs and various description formats play a huge role by acting as a source of truth for how our services work. I hope to see tooling that uses declarative documents to inform the entire API-building lifecycle, from ideation and design, to building tests, creating deployments on multiple environments and setting up monitoring/analytics tools – all based on the same source of truth!
On the API consumer side, we are still sending developers to documentation that can vary in quality and completeness. Humans are great at dealing with ambiguity and hopefully they’ll reach out when they have a support question. But increasingly services are consumed and discovered by machines, so I hope to see tooling that helps non-humans discover and understand the capabilities of APIs.
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visithttps://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
OpenAPI developer community and JSON Schema community work together to build upgrade that supports 100% compatibility with the latest draft of JSON Schema
SAN FRANCISCO – February 18, 2021 – The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on creating, evolving and promoting the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), a vendor-neutral, open description format for HTTP (including RESTful) APIs, announced today that the OpenAPI Specification 3.1.0 has been released. This new version now supports 100% compatibility with the latest draft (2020-12) of JSON Schema.
Along with this release, the OpenAPI Initiative has sponsored the creation of new documentation to make it easier to understand the structure of the specification and its benefits. It is available here: https://oai.github.io/Documentation/
The OpenAPI Specification is a broadly adopted industry standard for describing modern APIs. It defines a standard, programming language-agnostic interface description for HTTP APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic.
The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is used by organizations worldwide including Atlassian, Bloomberg, eBay, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Postman, SAP, SmartBear, Vonage, and many more.
“The benefits of using the OpenAPI Specification are broadly applicable, ranging from API lifecycle management, to documentation, to security, to microservices development and much, much more,” said Marsh Gardiner, Product Manager, Google, and Technical Steering Committee, OpenAPI Initiative. “Great care was taken in evolving to version 3.1.0 to ensure it is an incremental upgrade for existing users, while also making it an excellent candidate for immediate evaluation and adoption in corporate environments. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the diverse group of contributors for all their exceptional skills and effort on our latest achievement.”
“The mismatch between OpenAPI JSON Schema-like structures and JSON Schema itself has long been a problem for users and implementers. Full alignment of OpenAPI 3.1.0 with JSON Schema draft 2020-12 will not only save users much pain, but also ushers in a new standardised approach to schema extensions,” said Ben Hutton, JSON Schema project lead. “We’ve spent the last few years (and release) making sure we can clearly hear and understand issues the community faces. With our time limited volunteer based effort, not only have we fixed many pain points and added new features, but JSON Schema vocabularies allows for standards to be defined which cater for use cases beyond validation, such as the generation of code, UI, and documentation.
On Day One of JSON Schema draft 2020-12 being released, two implementations were ready. It’s humbling to work with such an experienced and skilled team.”
While JSON Schema is still technically a “draft” specification, draft 2020-12 sets a new stable foundation on which 3rd parties can build standardised extensions. The JSON Schema team do not foresee any major changes to the approach of the extension system, like dialects and vocabularies. However, the utility may be improved as feedback is received.
New top-level element for describing Webhooks that are registered and managed out of band
Support for identifying API licenses using the standard SPDX identifier
PathItems object is now optional to make it simpler to create reusable libraries of components. Reusable PathItems can be described in the components object. There is also support for describing APIs secured using client certificates.
The OpenAPI Initiative had adopted semantic versioning to communicate the significance of changes in software upgrades. Semantic versioning is a popular numbering methodology where minor version updates indicate changes to software are backward compatible, whereas major updates are not. Technically, using semantic versioning with the new full alignment with JSON Schema would require this change to be denoted as 4.0.0. However, this update to OpenAPI important improvements, specifically the alignment with JSON Schema, but to force it into a major release numbering would have created a mismatch of expectations.
Special Thanks
A special callout to Henry Andrews, Phil Sturgeon, and Ben Hutton for all their work, support and patient explanations they have provided to better align JSON Schema and the OpenAPI Specification. Many thanks to Lorna Mitchell for driving the Webhooks effort, using our new proposal process. And thanks to the many, many open source developers involved worldwide.
The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visithttps://www.openapis.org
About Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
