Today, eBay announced that they are leveraging the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) for all of its RESTful public APIs. With OpenAPI, developers can download an eBay OpenAPI contract, generate code and successfully call an eBay API in minutes. APIs play a critical role in eBay’s Developer Ecosystem helping the company build and deliver the best experiences to its buyers and sellers.
“The move to using the OpenAPI Specification was an unanimous choice given our needs and knowledge of the incredible ecosystem of developers that surround OpenAPI,” said Gail Frederick, GM of eBay Portland and VP Developer Ecosystem at eBay. “The OpenAPI Specification is the de facto standard for describing APIs and plays a critical role in the new microservices-based architecture at eBay.”
As a member and chairperson of the of the OpenAPI Initiative, I see more and more companies moving to distributed and microservice-based architectures as the need to build quality experiences for users and ship products or services to market faster is a linchpin to any business’ success. Technologies and tools created to support this transition are largely built from open collaboration, spanning application development technologies like Node.js to container orchestration like Kubernetes. Since APIs are the “glue” between distributed components, the OAS standard plays a central part in this transition.
This was definitely the case with eBay. As eBay transitioned from a monolithic and centralized architecture to a distributed microservice architecture, the company needed to evolve the way service contracts were explored, tested, published, and integrated with API specifications.
The company had a set of needs for this transition:
API contracts would need to meet the needs of seamless exploration and integration across a diverse technology stack, be industry standard, and be feature rich to complement our Technical Standards and governance models necessitated the exploration for a new specification.
The primary criteria was a specification that was both human and machine readable, language agnostic, vendor-neutral, and open source.
OAS became the unanimous choice due to its tooling support, fully customizable stack, code-first and contract-first approaches to API development, and most importantly because OpenAPI continues to evolve as a standard led by open collaboration from the OpenAPI Initiative. The move to OAS furthers eBay’s mission to its Developer Ecosystem to promote developer efficiency and productivity with no more SDKs and no more hours spent writing API client code.
eBay has been a member of the OpenAPI Initiative since August 2017 and one of the first in the industry to publish contracts based on OpenAPI 3.0 specification. We are very excited to see eBay’s continued support of our consortium, as well as other open collaboration projects, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). We look forward to sharing more around eBay’s success with OAS as well as the many users and members that make up our ecosystem during API Strategy & Practice Conference happening September 24 – 26 in Nashville, Tennessee. Learn more about this conference here, and keep up-to-date with news coming out of the OpenAPI Initiative here.
Join the OpenAPI Initiative and hundreds of API developers, strategist and thought leaders for 
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Cristiano is a Developer Experience designer who helps companies small and large to improve their developer onboarding, activation, and support. He likes to look at great developer onboarding flows, analysing and documenting the best practices and pitfalls of common design practices. Although he has over 15 years of development experience he believes that at the core we’re all beginners at some things, and documentation and onboarding should reflect that notion. In the past he’s worked as a contractor, startup founder, event organiser, and developer advocate at PayPal.
Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. Today, she is a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.
Kate O’Neill, “tech humanist,” is founder and CEO of KO Insights, an award-winning thought leadership and advisory firm helping companies, organizations, and cities make future-aligned meaningful decisions based on human behavior and data. Author of 3 books including PIXELS AND PLACE: Connecting Human Experience Across Physical and Digital Spaces, Kate speaks regularly at industry conferences and private events, providing keynotes, participating in panel discussions, and leading creative brainstorming workshops for groups of all sizes. Her expertise has been featured in CNN Money, TIME, Forbes, USA Today, Men’s Journal, the BBC, and other national and international media. Kate’s prior roles include creating the first content management role at Netflix, leading cutting-edge online optimization work at Magazines.com, developing Toshiba America’s first intranet, building the first departmental website at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and holding leadership positions in a variety of digital content and technology start-ups. She was also founder & CEO of [meta]marketer, a digital strategy and analytics agency. Kate is a vocal and visible advocate for women in technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership — she was featured by Google in the launch of their global campaign for women in entrepreneurship.
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Jenn Schiffer (
onboarding, activation, and support. He likes to look at great developer onboarding flows, analysing and documenting the best practices and pitfalls of common design practices. Although he has over 15 years of development experience he believes that at the core we’re all beginners at some things, and documentation and onboarding should reflect that notion. In the past he’s worked as a contractor, startup founder, event organiser, and developer advocate at PayPal.
