---
published: true
layout: post
title: Where Should API Governance Occur?
date: 2025-05-07T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - Governance
  - Federated
  - Centralized
  - Feedback Loops
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/copper-circuit-arrow-in-ground.jpeg
---
For teams who have adopted a design-first approach to APIs governance happens during the design time, and if your team is code-first it happens in the IDE during development time. If you are an engineering manager you likely don’t really care about the nuance between design and development times and see API governance occurring during the build-time right before production or any previous stage. This is something that very much shapes API governance because of who services and tooling are being sold to, but in reality API governance should occur D) All the Above.

- **Everywhere** - Governance needs to be ubiquitous across API operations, guiding teams all along the way.
- **Centrally** - Guidance, policies, rulesets, feedback loops, and other aspects of governance should be centralized.
- **Federated** - Tooling, rulesets, and other aspects of API governance should be localized to teams doing APIs.
- **Existing Tools** - API governance must leverage existing infrastructure, services, and tooling to guide teams.
- **Incremental** - You won’t be able to implement API governance all at once no matter how much you want to.
- **Over Time** - API governance will be applied, evolved, and refined over time as teams learn how things work.

It is easy to think of API governance as simple a centralized affair, when in reality, it will be both centralized and federated, evolving over time, little by little, leveraging existing infrastructure, IDE, and pipelines to help guide teams to produce the most mature and standardized APIs. There is no done state for API governance—even once you reach an ideal state across teams you will have turnover of staff, and new API products will emerge that need different standards applied, and making sure API governance is adaptable is the only way you will be able to move at the speed your leadership is asking for.