API governance support through the structural analysis of REST APIs

摘要

Today, REST APIs have established as a means for realizing distributed systems and are supposed to gain even more importance in the context of Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, and Microservices. Nevertheless, many existing REST APIs are known to be not well designed, resulting in the absence of desirable non-functional properties that truly RESTful systems entail. Although existing analysis show, that many REST APIs are not fully REST compliant, it is still an open issue how to improve this deficit and where to start. In this work, we apply structural analysis of REST APIs in order to support API governance, resulting in a set of basic and aggregated metrics that characterize an API set and also guide further governance tasks. We apply the structural analysis on a set of 286 real world APIs and then demonstrate how to derive suitable metrics that represent the perceived complexity of an API, complemented and validated by a survey of developers following the AHP process. As a result, we provide effective support for API governance, helping to identify and remedy problems in APIs.