---
published: true
layout: post
title: There Is Only API Consumption
date: 2025-07-07T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - Consumption
  - Integrations
  - Applications
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/1939-new-york-worlds-fair-waterfall-southern-oregon.jpg
---
I have hit the wall one more time in the last five years when it comes to my belief that people producing APIs will want to do the right thing. Whether it be API design-first, productization of APIs, governance, or any other narrative we’ve constructive narrative we’ve constructed to guide SMB, SME, and enterprises forward. The majority of this rhetoric is in service of selling you something, and the few people who do care about doing APIs well within large organizations just do not have the bandwidth and budget to care at the levels we’ve been selling to over the last decade or more. It is all a very nice thought, but once you spend enough time on the ground, you realize we are all pretty delusional in our beliefs for what the enterprise will do or won’t do, and what their priorities truly are.

Don’t get me wrong. Anyone within an organization striving to do the right thing when producing APIs should keep believing and working. I am also here to talk and counsel when you hit the realization that your executive leadership doesn’t share your beliefs, and APIs cease becoming a priority for one reason or another. I see many organizations who haven’t made APIs a priority, but need to. I see many organizations make APIs a priority, only to reverse course when the market winds or leadership changes. All of the startup and enterprise leaders I used to showcase for their approach to APIs have shifted course. Not because APIs don’t matter, but because there are many, many, many distractions along the API journey that will convince you they are more important, when in reality a well-designed HTTP API product with JSON and Webhooks that is well documented with an OpenAPI would suffice.

Everybody I have talked to in the last couple of years does not have the time, budget, and political clout to properly invest in producing APIs. APIs are produced simply to satisfy a tactical, ad hoc, and in the moment need to integrate data, deliver a new application feature, integrate systems and into clouds. With this belief I am confident in saying there is no “API production” discipline, there is only API consumption. An API doesn’t exist or matter until it is consumed. Nobody cares about APIs until they have a need to integrate data and other resources internally or as part of 3rd-party partnerships. Nobody cares about APIs until they stop working, become unreliable, and become a risk in some way. No matter how many frameworks, manifestos, philosophies, and standards we create, people just have a need, and that need centers around the consumption of data, content, media, and algorithms via integration with a variety of applications—with less or more standardization of observability, security, costs, and other cross-cutting concerns across these integration areas.

API consumption is where the power lies and API production is simply a commoditized market reality to satisfy API consumption needs. A produced API doesn’t exist without being consumed. An API doesn’t exist until it is applied. You could widen this to JDBC, ODBC, TCP, and other protocols, but you don’t get all the other value evolved over the last 25 years to support the consumption of HTTP APIs (ie. authentication, authorization, rate limits, service composition, traceability, observability, usage, logging, etc.). While these capabilities are sold as API producer concerns, it is simply because that is the buyer who has been identified, and overlook the reality that all of these things are API consumer concerns. I will be doing more deep thinking on this reality. I’ve long lived in the API producer camp, and worked hard to contrast my understanding of the producer realm with what I learned about API consumption while working at Postman. Fifteen years of work to define this line, and working with enterprise leadership to govern and manage API experience has left me realizing that all of this is about API consumption—that is all that matters.