Oct 30th, 2025
Tech Spotlight
API Consolidation
Written by: Max Hoaglund, Senior Technology Lead
This is a bit of a stuffy, dull observation to make, but APIs have become a ubiquitous tool of modern IT organizations. They’re seen as an essential ingredient in any company’s digital platform, and that’s mostly for good reason. (It wasn’t always like that!) They serve as connective tissue that enables systems, applications, and external vendors to interact. The value that organizations draw from their integration technologies varies in character and magnitude - they can facilitate everything from internal data sharing to modular application development. Ideally, they can allow a business to avoid friction as it scales and evolves in response to changing needs.
However, as companies build and accumulate APIs organically over time, it’s common for their observant IT staff to look back and cringe at the can of worms they opened in the name of forging ahead. Drawn by demand, IT teams can outpace the growth of governance, and they can find themselves facing a tangled web of inconsistent, redundant, and difficult-to-manage interfaces. Often these interfaces are mission critical. Consolidating and refining this portfolio becomes essential not only for operational efficiency but also for enabling future expansion. This is a point of reflection that calls for some very un-fun arithmetic about the cost of moving forward with the status quo, versus getting organized and (often) leveraging some new technology.
Consolidation is a task that requires balancing the flexibility APIs inherently provide with the discipline needed to organize and govern them effectively. It’s also a stress test for people and their communication tools. It’s a lot of work to discover or re-discover APIs that might span more than one platform or implementation style, not to mention nailing down the business requirements of each.
Planning for API consolidation is tough but profoundly important, and the choices an organization makes about how to approach it can predicate future success. The process typically begins with an exhaustive audit, cataloging all existing APIs, their dependencies, and their use cases. This step demands not only technical expertise but also significant coordination across teams to uncover undocumented or forgotten interfaces that may still support critical business functions. Beyond technical discovery, consolidation also requires an understanding of the business requirements tied to each API—what it does, who depends on it, and how it aligns with broader organizational goals. This phase often reveals redundancies, inconsistencies, and inefficiencies that make the case for standardization and streamlining all the more urgent. (It’s important to treat API consolidation basically like you would any other org-level transformation, but that’s challenging because business process and customer experience may not change at all.)
Once the scope of the work is clear, organizations must select the right API management tools to facilitate the consolidation effort. The choice of technology is influenced by the size and complexity of the API portfolio, org topology, security requirements, existing tech already leveraged, and long-term scalability goals. Answering these questions and coming to some clear conclusion is another big challenge that deserves all the technical brainpower you can devote to it. The landscape of platforms and products is too varied to parse here, but material differences between API products come down to:
- Observability
What tools does this technology give you for identifying, assessing, and responding to issues? More than just governance, how can this technology help prevent you from causing an expensive tennis match between technical teams? Don’t let this be an afterthought.
- Extensibility
How good of a job does this technology do of minimizing development effort?
- Compatibility
Mechanically speaking, does this technology allow you to accomplish what you need to?
- Governance/Management
In terms of process, does this technology allow you to manage the assets you build with it in a way that makes sense for the people in your organization? Does it allow you to apply the implementation principles you want to new APIs without sinking a huge investment into wiki-writing and inspection? Does it align with the way you manage identity and authorization, or will it be an annoying unicorn?
API consolidation is as much about preparing for the future as it is about untangling the past. It’s a chance to take stock of what your organization has built, align your integration strategy with the way your business actually operates, and start building with technical values that cut down on anxiety and sleepless nights. The challenge and payoff are both substantial.
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