OpenAPI Is the Unit of API Governance (opens in new tab)

If landscape mapping is where governance starts, OpenAPI is where it lives. It is the center of gravity for everything I do when I govern REST APIs, and the reason is simple and worth saying out loud: OpenAPI is the machine-readable contract, and the contract is the thing you govern. Not the code. Not the running service. The contract. Once you internalize that, the whole rest of the governance stack snaps into place, because everything hangs off the OpenAPI document. Your style guide describ...