API lifecycle phases depend on your API Architecture, but the basic flow remains the same. Here are the main phases of our approach when building an API.

Planning

We'd love our clients to respond to these questions to help us proceed with the design :

• What are the API capabilities?
• What type of authentication is to be used?
• What schema type to be used
• What is the schema format (JSON or YAML)?
• Which language or tool will be used to develop the API?
• What are the dependencies? What are the timelines?
• Also, to discuss if any certificates are involved in this.

Designing

During the design phase, it’s good to have complete knowledge of the purpose of the API. A draft API is designed, and that helps to verify with us before developing the actual API. This phase defines the sample endpoints and the sample responses. Mostly it will be the mocked sample responses.

Implementation

This is the actual development phase of the API. First, we will add the endpoints and the operation methods to the schema. Starting from the version, URL, path, params, responses, response codes, headers, authentication type, and error codes are configured in the API builder or some specific IDE based on the language used. Once the complete endpoints are ready, we can then generate the API documentation or manually give all the endpoints to the Testing team.

Testing

Unit testing is performed in this phase. Official testing is started when our developers provide the endpoints of the API. Now the API testers can go ahead and start testing the API endpoints by adding the assertions and verifying the behavior. Extensive testing is performed to detect the bugs early. Under API testing, different validations are performed to verify the performance, security, functionality, and load.

Deployment

The CI/CD pipeline is created here, and the APIs are integrated with them. This ensures seamless automation in the production environment. If there’s any API gateway integration, it is done in this phase. The complete end-to-end flow of the API is taken care of. If we have any dependency on third-party APIs, that is also carefully implemented here.

Versioning/Retirement

Once the API is deployed into production, it can go through two states based on the needs.

Versioning :

If the API stays in place and the enhancements are done based on the application changes, the API is versioned to track the changes. Proper versioning is a good practice, and this helps in debugging.

Retirement:

In some cases, the API becomes obsolete due to some application migration or retirement. So, the API is retired. Also, in some use cases, the API as such would have been developed for some temporary causes, so once the job is done, the API is retired or deprecated.