Understanding What Growth Means for APIs

APIs not only serve as a way for a company to offer a capability to external customers, but are also a big part of its internal infrastructure. Internal APIs allow teams to build infrastructure capabilities that other groups within an organization can use. Consequently, most APIs are made to be internal or for partner usage only and are not public-facing.

The definition of growth for an API product is deeply aligned with whether the APIs are for internal, private, or for public usage, as this will determine who the customer is and the tools they have available to discover and start using a given API.

Internal APIs

For internal APIs, the internal tooling makes APIs readily available to other teams. Usually, an API architecture or governance team establishs best practices for how APIs are built and published across an organization. Some tools, such as Postman, are utilized to share an API in the form of collections to help developers get started with APIs quickly. Postman allows a GUI-based interface where users can easily plug in their API credentials and get started. Tools such as Postman can often generate API reference ...