Abstract: It is very important to build a perfect API specification process system, to drive the whole API reform with methodology, to drive the sharing economy model with API reform, and to push back the digital transformation with the sharing model.

This article is shared from HUAWEI Cloud community API Strategy — HUAWEI’S API Reform Practice under the Tide of digitalization

Author: Wu Jianlin

An overview of the

Last year’s pandemic accelerated the current process of corporate digital transformation. The nature of corporate transformation and change has become critical under the impact of the continuous wave of digitalization. High-performing companies are accelerating digital innovation and leveraging the advantages of COVID-19 through emerging technologies to make themselves stronger. The outbreak is considered the most significant “turning point” of 2020. The 2021 CIO Agenda: From the Acceleration of This Opportunity for Digital Business, there are plenty of articles about Digital transformation cases with different arguments, but the essence of which is more about the sharing economy under the Digital wave. From trend discernible in recent years, many of the existing market business model, under the digital wave gradually turned into sharing mode to rent code, for example: Shared cycling, charging treasure, cloud service is also one of them, the original chimney system already was washed out gradually, how to quickly master the sharing is the core of economic governance becomes the key to digital transition.

If you recall the core content of IT sharing mode in recent years, IT is basically inseparable from API. For example, data opening, enterprise capability, artificial intelligence and so on are all shared through API. In the next few years, API will continue to cover and become the core medium of enterprise connection. According to IDC 2019 CIO agenda forecast, by 2021, driven by business needs, 70% of CIOs will build agile links for enterprises through API and architecture, so it is crucial to build a set of perfect API specification process system, with methodology to drive the whole API change, with API change to drive the sharing economy model, Push back digital transformation with sharing model.

Why launch an API strategy

Put APIs at the Center of Your Digital Business Platform —Gartner

With the transformation of data, Huawei’s API process reform has lasted for 10 years. Ten years ago, Huawei began to lay out its API strategy. Data is important to enterprises, but to generate value of corresponding data, continuous sharing and service governance will be generated. Gartner has also repeatedly mentioned the use of APIS as the core of digital transformation to drive the realization of shared enterprise capabilities. Gartner forecasts that the API management market as an asset will reach $6.2 billion in the full life cycle by 2024. There is huge market space.

In fact, foreign countries have started to lay out API strategy for a long time, and the maturity is now far beyond China. In 2016, Google resisted the pressure to acquire Apigee at the price of 650 million DOLLARS, which continued to lose money. At that time, everyone was still confused, until Apigee became the leader of the magic Quadrant, we didn’t know the reason. In 2018, Salesforce bought MuleSoft for $6.5 billion, which shows how important API strategy is to global vendors.

How has Huawei evolved over the past 10 years

How much of a challenge do we have in a complex case? Once an enterprise’s business develops to a certain stage, the complexity of internal business system’s interaction with external or internal sharing will rise sharply. Huawei has opened hundreds of thousands of apis and maintained a high level of continuous growth. Of course, it has faced many problems since 10 years ago:

  • There are too many apis, departments are acting independently, transmission protocols and specifications are not unified, and access costs are too high

API specifications of different departments are inconsistent, and it takes a lot of work for users to call and adapt.

  • Enterprise capability API, API failure brings high cost, quality protection has become the core

The integration between businesses is realized through API. API has become the core of the enterprise, and quality is the most important content.

  • Interservice invocation does not have a good API invocation experience in collaboration with departments

There is no unified platform for inter-service invocation, and good apis require constant operation and focus on the invocation experience.

  • Without unified API governance, API sunset changes become the main cause of live network accidents

Actual statistics show that more than 80% OF API faults are caused by API changes

  • The number of apis grew exponentially, and similar businesses continued to consume the team’s effectiveness

As departments develop separately, similar apis emerge one after another, and duplication of wheels results in large labor consumption

  • There are challenges in API usage and network penetration in the world’s eight largest data center businesses

In the world’s eight big data centers, API access and call all have great network challenges.

Drive enterprise cycle by process, standard and organization

The five revolution theory of digital transformation, including consciousness, organization, culture, method and mode, has brought the reconstruction of r&d operation mode to a great extent. In order to realize the implementation of the five revolution theory, we need to drive it from the three levels of process, specification and organization, and realize the great cycle within the enterprise. Specifications provide sufficient methodology support, processes improve the overall implementation efficiency, and organizations activate the continuous iteration of products and specifications.

Therefore, In the process of formulating API strategy, Huawei takes these three as the core content to construct a full-stack API life-cycle management standard process system divided by organization and role. The full life cycle of AN API consists of five major processes: design, implementation, management, consumption and analysis. Assets from Swagger documents, back-end capabilities, API services, API products, rotate through the process and evolve.

Each enterprise has different roles for users, so it abstracts four roles as a whole: designer, developer, manager and consumer. Each role is responsible for different processes and approval standards. Huawei’s role is analyzed as follows:

Why are specifications important?

Take a small case: API compatibility specification. Huawei has strict internal compatibility specification requirements. Changing any field of an interface requires multiple layers of approval. 2020-09-01T18:50:20.200z (ms accuracy), but because the background changed the format to 2020-09-01T18:50:20.200z (second accuracy), although only a small change, because the client did not recognize and judge the corresponding time accuracy, the device terminal directly abnormal X million units. Network accident. Examples abound of why headers in the API specification are not case-sensitive, and why underlining is not recommended, and each specification point is a bloody accumulation of lessons. Huawei has accumulated at least 100+ API process specifications in the past 10 years. From design, development, operation, operation and maintenance, testing and other dimensions, and continue to optimize.

In fact, the full life cycle specification of API can, to some extent, reflect the scale and internal organizational governance scheme of an enterprise. Without a perfect specification and process support, enterprises will encounter various bottlenecks and challenges after they reach the intermediate stage of development. Huawei has also climbed out of the mire of 10 years.

How can a product transform an organization?

A good product is usually supported by a set of sound methodology. The core of API strategy is its process and standard governance. Most enterprises want to transform and change their organizations first, and then find suitable tools and products through organizational reform. But I personally feel that as long as have a good methodology support, a product can bring qualitative change for an enterprise, the product is in the role of division of the process specification, supported by a methodology of products can be quickly comb organization with internal structure clear, use reverse thinking way to organizational change. There is no way out of data closure, but data sharing must be integrated into processes and specifications in an orderly manner.

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