Procurement is the experience of evaluating and adopting an API before building on it. Whether the API comes from another team or a third-party vendor, someone has to weigh its quality, reliability, licensing, and fit before it becomes a dependency. Good procurement is how organizations avoid betting critical systems on APIs that cannot carry the weight. I care about procurement because the decision to adopt an API is where reuse either happens or does not. When teams have a consistent way to evaluate an API's contracts, service levels, and track record, they reuse with confidence instead of rebuilding out of fear. Treating API adoption as a real procurement discipline is how consumer-side governance actually takes hold.
Procurement
Policies
Dependency SBOM Maintained
Require that every API maintain a current software bill of materials enumerating the libraries, services, and versions it depends on. I want a machine-readable SBOM and dependency manifest kept in ...
Procurement Evaluation Checklist
Require that every API considered for adoption be run through a documented procurement evaluation checklist before a team commits to it. I want the same questions asked each time, covering security...
Strategies
API Dependencies Have an SBOM
I want a software bill of materials for the APIs and services we depend on, so that we always know what is actually in the systems we ship. Every external API we consume is a dependency, and if we ...
APIs Are Evaluated Before Adoption
I want us to evaluate an API before we build on it, because the cheapest time to discover a bad dependency is before it is wired into production. That means running third-party APIs through a procu...
