Welcome to the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) February 2025 newsletter, the first of this year! Our newsletter brings you initiative news, details of new versions of our specifications, and information on events and educational resources.
Initiative News
2025 got off to a great start with the release of version 1.0.1 of Arazzo. If you don’t know about Arazzo, it’s a specification designed to describe complex, multi-step workflows that invoke multiple API operations and is aimed at simplifying integrations in our multi-cloud, multi-platform world. Version 1.0.1 is aimed at providing important clarifications without altering core functionality, ensuring greater clarity, improved examples for implementers, and corrections of minor inaccuracies. You can read more about the release, including the proposed 2025 release schedule for Arazzo in our blog.
Work continues on version 3.2 of the OpenAPI Specification, with several changes already accepted in the work-in-progress version. Features include:
- Security changes including support for Device Authorization Flow, a new property to signpost OAuth 2.0 Server Metadata and deprecated OAuth2 schemes.
- A new Tag Object format, with the ability to categorize and nest your tags to create an expressive, hierarchical structure.
Version 4, codename Moonwalk, will also continue to evolve in 2025. Insights from Moonwalk have helped to evolve the 3.x release line, as they were backwards compatible, with the version 3.2 features mentioned above. Please read our latest post on Moonwalk for more information on where the work is going.
One final note is that our OpenAPI specification page now supports dark mode! We are dedicated to ensuring usability for our specifications, so this is an important feature to add to our specification website. Please head over there to check it out.
Events News
2025 also saw the early appearance of the OAI Track at DeveloperWeek 2025, an industry-leading developer event that hosted the OAI Summit. The Summit provided two workshops on OpenAPI, hosted by Erik Wilde and Frank Kilcommins followed by 11 sessions covering topics including Arazzo, Overlays, API Governance, and the intersection between APIs and AI. Our thanks go to all who participated in the Summit and helped bring many aspects of the OpenAPI Initiative world to life for conference attendees.
The end of February also saw Leap 2.0, held by OpenAPI member Tyk. Leap 2.0 is a virtual conference hosted by BGB chairperson Budha Bhattacharya. The conference is focused on all things API governance and includes presentations from current OpenAPI TSC member Lorna Mitchell and OAI luminaries including Kin Lane. API governance in the world of API sprawl and AI growth, especially with the advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), means that having a strong grasp on both API design and deployment is vital for API providers.
The event’s roster for 2025 is constantly updated, so please stay in touch with our Events page to see where you can get together with OpenAPI community members for in-person and virtual events.
Outreach Initiatives
The Outreach committee focuses on community engagement and marketing for OAI. We have some goals we’d like to achieve in 2025, and the newsletter provides a great opportunity to publicize these.
First off, we are looking to expand our blog to include success stories from the OpenAPI community. Have you used OpenAPI, Arazzo, or Overlay in a way that has changed or even revolutionized your working practices? Have you delivered solutions that have delighted your customers, or your internal stakeholders, using an OAI Specification as the foundation? You may use the OpenAPI specification indirectly, as it is abstracted by the tooling you use, but we’d still like to hear about your experiences.
We are also looking to expand our training and certification offering to help provide clear and consistent education on OAI specifications in the community. We are currently in the ideation phase, looking at how to provide a certification mechanism for training that delivers knowledge of the OAI specifications, as a means for anyone using OpenAPI, Arazzo, and Overlay to attest their knowledge. If you are a training provider and interested in collaborating with OAI on providing certified training we’d love to hear from you.
Lastly, we are introducing a new feature on our LinkedIn page called #happyfriday, where we post articles brought to us from the community. If you’d like to contribute to this, please follow the instructions below to get in touch.
Finally…
Thank you for reading our newsletter. As always, we welcome suggestions on how we can improve it or bring you information that can help make the most of how you use specifications published by the OpenAPI Initiative. Please get in touch on the Outreach channel on Slack if you would like to work with us to tell your story, or get involved with any of the initiatives described above.
Author: Chris Wood