Welcome

Patterns for creating an API Stewardship Practice

Thanks for taking a few moments of your time to check out this web site. Here we'll be talking about everything it takes to build a practice around designing, building, and delivering APIs at scale.

Patterns have impacted many areas of software development and are a great way to express common ideas. We are going to use this methodology to express what we've learned as we work to put the tools and processes in place to try and help other developers build and deliver better APIs.

Many of these patterns are based on working on Microsoft's Azure API Stewardship board. They capture our experiences and the essence of what we've learned from working with our Azure service teams, talking with customers and our field teams. These patterns are a key ingredient to how we can scale to deliver thousands of APIs and hundreds of SDKs across the Azure surface area. More and more though, they reflect conversations we've had with friends and colleagues in the industry who are passionate about APIs--and passionate about helping people.

We hope these patterns are a starting point for a larger conversation with architects, developers, and managers who are building and delivering a large number of services and struggle with how to scale while still creating a great developer experience.

We have a long way to go and this is definitely a work in progress! In many ways, we are still at the outset of our journey. We are constantly learning, uncovering new requirements, and figuring out what to do with edge cases.

It's our hope that you will join us. Please share your experiences (and patterns!) through pull requests, add comments through issues, or start a discussion.

So, let's get started. Together, we can all grow an orchard.