The number of APIs has been increasing year-over-year, as they’re the infrastructure that makes the majority of modern digital architecture possible. Given that everything from AI to SaaS involves APIs at their core, it’s not the greatest shock that 78% of organizations don’t even know how many APIs they manage. A report from F5 finds that large companies manage an average of 1,400 APIs, with some having as many as 10,000. Even smaller companies can have as many as 200.

In short, barely anybody works with a single API. Managing multiple APIs is no longer optional for many enterprises — it’s simply a fact. But many organizations don’t have a unified plan for managing their APIs, leading to a disparate API portfolio with various styles and tools. Haphazard approaches and poor governance can even produce shadow APIs.

In light of this reality, we’ve put together a few tips for managing multiple APIs. We’ll cover tips on cataloging APIs, aligning on consistent security controls and governance, and more to help manage different APIs across an organization.

1. Create a Centralized API Registry

Visibility is one of the first problems organizations face when managing multiple APIs. Different teams manage APIs differently, resulting in undocumented endpoints, duplicate services, and potentially even zombie APIs. Not only does it make managing multiple APIs challenging, but it also makes it harder to onboard new developers and users.

A centralized API registry eliminates this challenge by becoming the single point of truth for all APIs. By including endpoint definitions, authentication methods, information about API ownership, rate limiting, version history, dependencies, usage examples, and code snippets, the likelihood of unstandardized APIs decreases significantly. So does the amount of knowledge it takes for new users to get started with the API, reducing the amount of time necessary for onboarding.

2. Standardize Authentication, Naming, and Governance

Inconsistent standards and conventions can become a major issue when an API ecosystem gets big enough. Without proper documentation and internal coordination, one API might use OAuth 2.0, another might use API keys, while a third might use custom HTTP authentication headers. This type of fragmentation around API security standards can cause issues with API adoption and integration, and increase the likelihood of errors.

Adopting a universal governance policy helps eliminate these risks. Centralized governance policies can dictate standards for everything from naming conventions, schema details, versioning, API documentation, and more. This also helps to reduce the risk of duplicate or unnecessary work.

3. Implement Comprehensive Monitoring and Observability

When a system is working with multiple APIs, it gets harder to track errors and see where things went wrong. An outage can come from a third-party API, a faulty authentication token, a networking or rate-limiting issue, or an unmet dependency. Without comprehensive monitoring, it becomes slow and inefficient to troubleshoot an API when things go wrong.

For a comprehensive overview of how an API ecosystem is behaving, developers should implement real-time monitoring of:

• API response times
• Availability
• Error rates
• Throughput
• Authentication failures
• Dependencies

Centralized API dashboards, distributed tracing, and real-time alerts are all popular and effective methods for monitoring multiple APIs.

4. Plan for API Versioning and Lifecycle Management Early

APIs are constantly evolving. Endpoints change, payload structures expand, authentication methods shift, and functionality becomes outdated. When organizations manage many APIs at the same time, versioning can become a real challenge.

Failing to plan for API lifecycle management properly can cause major outages, leading to downstream disruptions, broken integrations, and disrupted workflows. It’s in everybody’s best interest to decide on a versioning policy as early as possible and to stick to it.

5. Use API Gateways and Automation

Managing multiple APIs manually quickly becomes an impossibility. Authentication methods, rate limiting, routing, caching, logging, and rules around retries and security are hard to maintain consistently across services. API gateways centralize many of these tasks.

An API gateway serves as a unified entry point for API traffic. It can enforce authentication rules, rate limiting, monitor traffic, transform requests, cache responses, and route requests to the appropriate backend services. They greatly simplify operational management while improving consistency across APIs.

Automation also reduces the number of tasks that need to be managed manually.

Automation can especially help with:

• API discovery
• Gateway configuration
• Security policies
• API documentation
• CI/CD integration
• Secret rotation
• Real-time monitoring and alerting

Federated API management is becoming an increasingly popular style for managing multiple APIs, as it allows developers to work with APIs and multiple API gateways wherever they’re located. This includes APIs being managed by different API gateways as well as APIs being deployed on the cloud or other styles of distributed architecture. Even better still, federated API management allows developers to implement new API patterns other than REST and SOA, making it a useful bridge between legacy APIs and emerging technologies. Federated API management is shaping up to become an important step towards universal API management.

6. Lead the API Culture

Lastly, leading by example is almost always going to be more effective than simply telling people what to do, especially when those directives might be spread all over creation. Showing developers and users exactly how you manage multiple APIs not only gives them concrete examples to show them how to implement and use your APIs, but it also helps illustrate naming conventions, security protocols, and other best practices your organization is using.

To guide internal practices, many organizations create an API Center of Excellence (CoE), which allows them to lead the API culture instead of blindly rushing after their users’ whims. Even better, an API CoE can serve as a centralized hub for everything having to do with your APIs, including fielding questions from users. This creates a better developer experience while also ensuring governance and consistency, even across many APIs.

Managing Multiple APIs Requires Visibility and Governance

The API industry isn’t going to become less complex. AI-driven tools like LLMs and AI agents are creating and consuming APIs at an unprecedented rate. Development teams continue to be decentralized, spread across the globe, with software and new connected technologies creating and consuming more data than ever. With that in mind, we have every reason to believe that the number of developers managing multiple APIs is only going to keep growing.

The good news is that many of the techniques for managing multiple APIs effectively are also just solid best practices for API development in general. It’s a good idea to have a centralized API registry, standardized design principles, and real-time API monitoring, no matter how many APIs you have. This way, you’re ready for anything.