The developer conversation on APIs is all about innovation and experimentation. To a developer:
- Reuse is about speed to deliver
- Sharing is about expediency
- Encapsulation is about less to learn

Bottom line, developers want easily consumable APIs and care much less about how those APIs were created in the first place. Part of “easy to consume” is of course what the API itself looks like, but there is more to it than that:
- How do you find the API?
- How easy is to register to use the API?
- How do I know if I can trust the API in my mission critical solution?

An effective API ecosystem provides developers with a community centric view of exactly the APIs available to them for their current task. There is a self-service registration mechanism, “pre-approval” is already in place for the APIs visible to the community. Social features of the community allow people to like or dislike a particular API. And analytics show the consumer what can be expected in terms of operational behavior of a particular API.

These are capabilities that historically are not part of IT governance, yet they are a core value provided to API consumers by API management solutions. Good API management solutions also add value for the provider of an API, allowing easier creation of that API and improved control of its runtime behavior – more about APIs from an IT management perspective in a later blog.

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