PRESENTATION: “We brought OpenAPI Docs into our service catalog. Now what?” by Harsha Reddy (Engineer) and Zoe Song (Developer Experience), Wayfair
When: Thursday, August 12, 2021 — 7pm-9:00pm
Please RSVP at: https://www.meetup.com/atlantaphp/events/280015254/.
Zoom Webinar Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/451710299
Presentation: We brought OpenAPI Docs into our service catalog. Now what?
With a large, globally distributed engineering department of over 2,000 engineers, service discoverability and access to API documentation are important problems at Wayfair. Integrations between systems require close coordination and overhead, making these kinds of projects expensive and brittle. To address this problem, we sought to surface OpenAPI documentation in our Backstage Service Catalog.
We will discuss how over 175 API specifications are shared amongst teams at Wayfair. Our solution leverages the Kubernetes API, together with our home-grown tool for project generation, to programmatically surface OpenAPI files for inspection in Backstage. Backstage is a service catalog and developer portal recently released as open source by Spotify. Our work has had immediate service discoverability benefits for developers across our enterprise, with thousands of API doc page views since it launched. Of course, our work is never complete! As the solution rolled out, we discovered a lot of complexity in the space of surfacing API docs. We’ll discuss some of the problems we’ve encountered, as well as the solutions we’re trying, along the way. These problems included: whether to support code-first or schema-first development; how to store API schemas; and how to enforce versioning as part of the CI/CD pipeline. At the end of the talk, we want the audience to have a good understanding of the benefits of service discoverability, as well as the trade-offs inherent in making API specs discoverable.
About Harsha: Engineer on the Service to Service platform team at Wayfair. I am building a modern security ecosystem for the Service oriented world and am educating developers to follow best practices for the same. Making developers’ life easier is what I consider awesome. GIF, emoji enthusiast. Love good hard hikes without any creepy crawlies.
About Zoe: Developer Experience team at Wayfair. Working on Backstage at Wayfair, that is the go-to place for discovering services, creating resources, and executing workflows. Tap water enthusiast.
(Due to COIVD-19 limiting in-person meetings, we’ve joined forces with Boston PHP and Austin PHP to form MergePHP, your new PHP Mega Meetup Group! We’ll be working together to provide high quality speakers in a multi-group session. Otherwise, it’ll work like our previous online meetings but NOTE: we’ll meet on the second Thursday of the month for now, instead of the first Thursday.)
