Ado Trakic is part of the Capital One Platform Services Centre of Excellence team. In this article, he discusses designing APIs at scale and how this API design enables Capital One to deliver products much faster.
Capital One is a bank that a tech company would build. We are changing banking for good. Technology is central to our business strategy, and we are using real-time data at scale, artificial intelligence machine learning, and the power of the cloud to solve challenging industry problems and build products, services, and experiences that indeed make a real difference in millions of people’s lives. We are more than 12,000 technologists working on software development, infrastructure and operations, machine learning and data science, cybersecurity, engineering, and many others.
Capital One’s digital transformation journey
We have fully migrated to the cloud, and we are all in with the adoption of Cloud technologies. We are undergoing data-driven digital transformation. By leveraging modern technologies such as AI and machine learning for data insights that can help better serve our customers. We treat data as a product. Data delivery in real-time is important for faster insights. And we have several self-service capabilities with built in governance. Capital One is using technology to change the banking industry. As we say, we are banking on technology. We have grown into one of the world’s greatest software engineering companies. We have spent many years working to create, iterate, and operate software.
We have fully modernized our applications to be cloud native, open source first, the API Interfaces, microservices architecture, and lots of automation being automated testing and deployment. We are focusing hard on standardizing and automating software development and deployment so that developers can focus on high-value, unique work in order to ship high-quality software much faster. Our machine learning applications, APIs, and Cloud products are already preventing online credit fraud, empowering partners to innovate with us, and helping other businesses harness the power of the cloud.
Enterprise API governance evolution
We started a while back with distributed design and central governance. As the team grew, we realized that this did not scale well. So, we have decided to shift our strategy to enable a large-scale design.
We adopted a federated model with this distributed governance.
API Platform
Our API platforms focus on usability with polished API governance practices to realize API governance at scale. We collaborate constantly with teams across the enterprise. We have built an API-centric approach to software development, and this journey never stops. There is always more to be done. APIs are the glue that holds the digital worlds together.
Platform Services Center of Excellence
This Center of Excellence enables teams in many areas, such as accelerating transformation, supporting development teams, and creating tooling and automation. We and other team members across the enterprise publish standards and guidelines. We provide training and evaluate and adopt new technologies. In terms of support, we provide coaching, DX reviews, and have a community of practice. We develop software tools fac,ilitate compliance, and pay close attention to increasing consistency and quality across API designs. The heart of our API design of scale enablement is the extra review process, producer training, guidelines, standards coaching, and several tools and techniques.
DX review process
This is a critical component of delivering API designer scale. At a high level, there are five steps in the process, going from planning, design, DX review, development, and production. At any point in time, teams can go in between the process steps; for example, if they are in development and the team realizes that there are additional API changes that need to be designed, they can go back either to the planning phase or design phase, to change their open API design, then, that gets submitted for DX review. Likewise, if the API is already in production, sooner or later, there is a need to make a change to that existing API, which leads to API design changes. Teams return to the planning and design phases, make changes, and submit their APIs for DX reviews.
Enterprise retraining
We would like to enable all of our API producers to deliver great APIs. Everyone should have access to several resources, like online video courses, with API fundamentals, modeling designs, and different API conventions adopted in Capital One. API producers can get certified in API design, and we are identifying design coaches in various lines of businesses that help us be on the front line in this API design. This training ensures that API design principles, service protocols, tools, and lifecycle are fully understood, with several tools to help API designers act independently, without our help. Our coaches are an important component in the API design and delivery at scale. We have API champions across the enterprise.
Our API platform has several critical components, including the API lifecycle tool, Discovery portals, and the platinum level or gateway. The lifecycle tool has an end-to-end workflow, flexible deployment, built-in design, and governance and uses Open API specification. The portals for APIs are internal and external, with access control, so API access is authorized as needed.
This process and journey evolve continually and do not stop. We continuously gather customer input. We enable developers to focus on delivering core business value. We develop partnerships and create a number of API design planning resources to enable easy onboarding. We constantly work on API Standards, patterns, and guidelines.
