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See also: API Design Cheat Sheet

Platform-Building Cheat Sheet

First off, we need to understand what is meant by the term 'platform' for the organization. In todays world, the term 'platform' is such an overused buzzword that it is largely meaningless. Platforms exist at many levels in the technology stack: hardware, datacenter, database, messaging, etc. and can also be used to describe ecosystems of user experiences.

The view presented here is decidedly business focused: the 'platform' is really the method of exposing and growing the digital business model and its offerings. So, the following ground rules define the platform as the digital server-side, back-end data and functionality, leaving the user experiences to be crafted (whether mobile, web or other) on top of that business functionality.

This API-centric definition of 'platform' enables:

• Rapid user experience revision
• Consistent user experience across devices
• Better channel adaptation
• Faster and cheaper third-party integrations
• Increased innovation capabilities.

Platform Ground Rules

1. Mobile applications are a first-class citizen and consumer of the platform.
   • Making mobile a priority increases ease of use and adoption for everyone.
2. The platform exposes its data and functionality via a complete set of RESTful APIs.
   • An API-based strategy maximizes reuse and flexibility.
3. All service interfaces and events are designed from the ground up to be public facing.
   • Causes design for ease of use, flexibility and reuse.
4. Each team of developers access all APIs using their team's own registered developer key.
   • Improves security, auditability.
5. There is a single token source and format for all APIs.
   • Assists in ease of use and ensures all functionality is available to consumers.
6. The platform will notify interested observers of all resource state changes via fully-composed events.
   • Enables synchronization asynchronously (for all create, update, delete state changes).
7. All APIs use a single identity to represent the consumer / user.
   • Enables analytics and reasoning about consumers.
8. All APIs have a consistent look and feel, and are documented at a single, publicly-available location.
   • Maximizes reuse and ease of use.
9. No private interfaces. No backdoors. No shared databases across teams (Observe 'Bounded Contexts').
   • Ensures the public interfaces are sound.
10. APIs are deployed in a distributed, always-on architecture (multi-node, multi-zone, and multi-region) with a discipline towards resilience.
    • Horizontal scale on commodity hardware, global reach. Account for the inevitable failures.