Microsoft has published its REST API Design Guidelines to the API community.
According to Gareth Jones, Principal API Architect, who announced its release:
“The effort got started from hearing two key points of feedback from customers:
It should be easier to get started with Microsoft APIs – Developers wanted to be able to run the curl tool against an API endpoint and get a human-readable result in just a few minutes
APIs for Microsoft cloud services should be consistent – Developers didn’t care that an API to work with an Azure virtual machine and an API to work with a user’s Office 365 documents were developed by different parts of the company, they were both from Microsoft and developers expected consistency
One of the goals of the effort was to find the right balance of detail in the guidelines. We wanted a document that sufficiently codified best practices, but was also approachable for individual contributor engineers and technical product/program managers.”
Microsoft is a member Open API Initiative, which has been spun out of Swagger.
According to Gareth Jones:
“These guidelines represent a multi-year, cross-company, collaborative process aggregating the collective experience of hundreds of engineers designing, operating, and running global scale cloud services from across Microsoft; and listening to feedback on our APIs from customers and partners. We have attempted to incorporate those learnings along with industry best practices in the API space to create guidelines that API teams across Microsoft use on a daily basis.”
“It’s our hope that by contributing ours to the community conversation, we can add to the body of community knowledge and reusable content so that anyone can draw upon more collective knowledge when looking to set standards and guidelines within their organization.”
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