About Lifecycle & Governance

This is an exploration in how the API lifecycle can be better defined and communicated across teams, by providing an opinionated view of what the API life cycle can be. Not having a common definition definition of what the lifecycle is is the most common problems faced by operations, and with this we are looking to ground discussions across the Postman community.

This exploration aims to look beyond just the lifecycle and consider what roles should be involved across the API lifecycle, as well as considering how governance can be applied across the API lifecycle using requirements, policies, rules, and standards to help deliver more consistent APIs across teams.

To balance this exploration out we want to look at the consumer side of things, pushing API producers to consider what consumers are needing when it comes to API operations, helping strike a balance between API producer and consumer, and achieve greater velocity as each API moves forward with new versions.

THis project runs on Github and is continually being evolved, so come back often. Right now there is just a single blueprint web APIs using a design-led approach but we'll soon add additional blueprints for other approaches like code-led and proxy-led, but then also look at GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSockets APIs to better understand what is possible when it comes to standardizing the API lifecycle across different types.