OpenAPI Initiative Welcomes RapidAPI

RapidAPI is joining the OpenAPI Initiative! RapidAPI helps developers find, manage, and test APIs. They provide an API Marketplace for developers to discover and connect to thousands of public APIs. The company’s services can be tailored to a company’s brand, to build private marketplaces for internal and external APIs. Notable enterprise clients include SAP, Cisco, Tata, and Hyatt.

To learn more about RapidAPI Marketplace, sign up for a free account here.

To better understand how RapidAPI provides a next-generation infrastructure for APIs and what a collaboration with the OpenAPI Initiative would mean for them, we asked Iddo Gino, CEO and Founder.

Why did RapidAPI join the OpenAPI Initiative, and why now?

APIs are the heart and soul of RapidAPI. With acquisitions like the Paw Client and unique developer tools such as RapidAPI Testing — we care deeply about the developer experience of writing, publishing, and ultimately maintaining APIs. OpenAPI plays a significant role in all of this.

Our goal in joining the OpenAPI Initiative is to give back to the community. As we build the next-generation of API Developer Tooling, it’s more important than ever to be part of the API builders’ community conversations. OAI is where API builders and API consumers go beyond the original spec to collaborate on exciting things such as JSON Schema and Asynchronous APIs and beyond. RapidAPI wants to help advance the specification through participation in the community.

Additionally, we’re committed to making our platform easily interface with 3rd party tools. Therefore, it’s important for us to continually support the OpenAPI Specification format, allow interconnectivity of all tools, and avoid customer lock-in.

The RapidAPI team has a history of participation in development communities. Our Head of DevRel Ahmad Awais is an active voting member of the Node.js Community Committee and WordPress Foundation Core Contributor before that. Our Head of Marketing, Suzanne Panoplos, has been active in the Open Container Initiative and CNCF. As you can see, joining the OpenAPI Initiative and becoming a member of the Linux Foundation couldn’t be a more natural transition for RapidAPI.

What goes into making an API marketplace? What makes one better than the other?

A robust API marketplace enables developers to find, connect and manage APIs from a single place and support a variety of APIs including REST, SOAP, GraphQL or Asynchronous APIs. For each API you should be able to see performance metrics like average latency, uptime, and popularity and be able to test the API from the browser.

Additionally, a marketplace should enable you to:

Gather information about each API using the endpoints page to view a list of endpoints, documentation, and a code snippet to help you implement the code into your app.
Subscribe to API plans to start using it. Manage all your API subscriptions and payments through a single source.
Utilize a single key for all your APIs.
Manage applications and API keys using a single dashboard. Using this dashboard, you should be able to:
- Monitor API performance by visualizing how many requests are made to different APIs, tracking the number of requests that return an error, and viewing latency data for each API.
- Debug faster by inspecting the logs for all requested data.
- View usage and billing information for a breakdown of API spending, including the monthly recurring and overage charges.
- Manage subscriptions from one place including quota usage and time remaining until the quota limit resets.

How has COVID affected the use of APIs in the past year?

With the pandemic, digitalization has gone from being a “nice to have” to an imperative to survival. Take Starbucks as an example. Before the pandemic, 7% of Starbucks revenue came from mobile ordering. During the pandemic, 100% of their revenue came from mobile ordering as most stores were closed to in-person ordering.

To react to the changing environment during the pandemic, companies had to adjust their application development process and accelerate their delivery to address changing market conditions. To do so, companies have to rely on APIs in their software development.

This trend is true across almost all industries during the pandemic. Still, there has been an explosion of API usage in healthcare settings, where services, appointments, and scheduling have taken place online to the homebound consumption of services such as food ordering, retail, etc.

This trend was highlighted in RapidAPI’s 2020 Developer Survey, released earlier this year. The survey indicated that developer reliance on APIs accelerated during the pandemic and will continue to increase in 2021.The data revealed that 61% of developers used more APIs in 2020 than in 2019, and 71% plan to use even more during the upcoming year.

What’s your vision for API marketplaces 1-3 years out?

As API proliferation continues to increase across all organizations, enterprises will find it to be a necessity for finding, connecting to and managing their APIs. Marketplaces will need to provide:

An Open Platform – With organizations using disparate API gateways, marketplaces will offer a platform for integrating with multiple different gateways and clouds.
Developer Experience – Marketplaces will need to be continually developer-first, providing the key features needed to deliver API use and reuse such as deep search and tagging API analytics for providers or consumers, and advanced usage controls for developers.
Out of the box experience – Marketplaces will need to have everything developers need to succeed including advanced features such deep search, end user analytics, and developer registration workflows.
Many-to-Many Model – Marketplaces will need to support multiple teams of API providers offering APIs to internal consumers as well as partners and customers.
Support for All API Types – Marketplaces should support all of the last APIs including SOAP, REST, GraphQL, Async APIs like Kafka, and more.
Scalability – Marketplaces should scale to support hundreds of APIs with room for future growth.
Governance – Marketplaces will unify visibility and governance across all APIs in the organization, regardless of which clouds or API gateways are in use.

We are excited to welcome RapidAPI to our list of growing members and look forward to working closely together!

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participate in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.