API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

The office of the CIO has embarked on an ambitious mission to offer all of the enterprise capabilities it delivers to run the Intuit business as a comprehensive and cohesive set of reusable RESTful services. The "IT as a service" initiative has achieved a high level of design consistency across disparate functional teams and their domains, developing a unified set of carefully crafted API contracts that meet the needs of multiple business units. The purpose of this talk is to share Intuit IT's experience with contract design, sharing a little bit about its API First process, service and resource granularity, and then jumping into a review of key design idioms that get used consistently including URL structure, pagination, HATEOAS links, immediate link traversal, resource expansion, client-API synchronicity patterns, versioning, and error codes. The talk concludes with a high level summary of Intuit IT's design strategy and the future introduction of a query language abstraction layer over the services designed and implemented today.