The application and API security industries are rethinking access control for AI agents. However, the underlying foundations remain the same ones the industry has relied on for years. What’s changing is how and when those foundations are applied. Depending on the use case, a given approach may work best at runtime, with proper contextual signals, ...
#strategy
38 posts
20 May
18 May
Agentic AI certainly dominated the theme of apidays New York, an event that brought together some of the API industry’s top thinkers and implementers for two days in mid-May 2026. It’s clear that APIs are still as important as ever, but they are now being repositioned as an execution layer for this new paradigm. In ...
7 May
Thanks to pioneers like Twilio and Stripe, API products have redefined what a great developer experience (DX) looks like. These companies have demonstrated how targeted API products, along with exceptional documentation and onboarding, can make developers enthusiastic advocates for their brands. However, the API product market is shifting — the rise of AI agents means ...
30 Apr
At PayPalDevDay 2025, PayPal’s Nathaniel Olson discussed a familiar problem. When he asked an AI coding assistant to build a product involving APIs, it was far too common for the AI to use outdated APIs rather than the most current iterations. It’s not that the official documentation or SDKs weren’t up-to-date, it’s the fact that ...
9 Apr
In recent months, the hype machine around agentic API consumption has been working overtime. In 2025, Kong reported that as many as 90% of enterprises are actively adopting AI agents and 79% expect full-scale adoption within three years. The agents aren’t coming; they’re here. The importance of agent experience has taken center stage, while AI ...
8 Apr
It’s 2026, and if you follow the tech industry, you are likely already familiar with terms like MCP servers and clients, LLMs, AI agents, and RAG applications. These components represent the visible surface when it comes to the AI conversation. But have you ever stopped to consider the underlying infrastructure that actually makes these technologies ...
1 Apr
In October 2025, Anthropic released Agent Skills as a feature for Claude. Within two months, early Agentic Skills had been built by partners like Atlassian, Figma, Canva, Stripe, Notion, and Zapier. How did a brand-new feature evolve into a pattern adopted so quickly across the enterprise? The rapid ascent of agent skills speaks to their ...
25 Mar
When it comes to APIs, security has always been a serious concern. Developers who design and build APIs strive to mitigate vulnerabilities before attackers find them. Consumers want to be reassured that the APIs their applications integrate with won’t compromise data or application integrity. However, the rise of AI has led to new and evolving ...
24 Mar
On January 7, 2026, Dr. Wayne Liu, president and chief growth officer of Perfect Corp., delivered a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) titled “API-First Innovation: Scalable AI for the Modern Beauty Shopper,” discussing the many different ways that AI is impacting the beauty industry. In the process, he makes a case for our ...
17 Mar
If you build distributed applications, you’re likely already familiar with microservices. While the definition varies across the tech industry, I prefer the one from Sam Newman’s book Building Microservices. In it, he concisely describes microservices as “small, autonomous services that work together.” The concepts of microservices have been around for about fifteen years now. However, ...
12 Mar
Over the past decade or two, APIs have quietly shifted from behind-the-scenes infrastructure to fully-fledged products. And companies that treat them as such are making big bucks doing so. According to Postman’s 2025 State of the API Report, 65% of organizations now generate revenue from their API programs. And, among organizations that make money from ...
25 Feb
When it comes to APIs, access control is an incredibly important part of ensuring that your APIs are as secure and properly controlled as possible. In this context, one of the most effective methods that has arisen is role-based access control (RBAC), a security practice that segments access to digital systems based on roles. In ...
19 Feb
Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting many exceptional speakers on the Nordic APIs stage. Our most memorable talks span architectural deep dives, anti-patterns, emerging trends, personal journeys, and hard-earned lessons on what it takes to build great API platforms. To the audience, these presentations often look effortless. But the truth is, there’s ...
17 Feb
In recent months, we’ve been writing extensively about some of the exciting possibilities offered by artificial intelligence and the agentic consumption of APIs, from new routes to monetization via AI through to more efficient workflows. But there are downsides to consider here, too. Large language models (LLMs) have a habit of disregarding the API contract, ...
12 Feb
Model Context Protocol (MCP) has made huge waves in the industry as of late. Since MCP makes it incredibly easy to point agentic implementations towards tools and resources, it’s been used for everything from context-driven customer service tools to order fulfillment backends. One of the most interesting use cases, and one that is currently emerging ...
11 Feb
Nothing frustrates a user more than a slow or non-responsive website or application. This is especially true in ecommerce, where slow-loading pages lead to high bounce rates and lower conversion rates. Often, the hidden culprit behind delays is a high-latency API. Many app developers integrate multiple third-party APIs, cumulatively adding more latency. As more APIs ...
5 Feb
Building API-first is an incredibly powerful strategy — it brings a ton of value to organizations seeking to make their data and APIs more consumable, more useful, and more valuable. Interestingly, however, it seems like API-first has another huge benefit: AI-first. So what does it mean to be API-first, and what benefits does this carry ...
4 Feb
It is no longer a secret that AI and APIs are intimately connected. Whether it’s building foundational infrastructure or powering MCP servers, APIs are the essential building blocks. However, for AI to deliver a positive impact, these APIs require rigorous governance and management. APIs serve as the technical key to an AI initiative and provide ...
27 Jan
For much of their history, APIs have quietly powered the online world we depend on. They form the invisible framework connecting applications, synchronizing data, and automating workflows. Once considered a technical necessity, APIs have now evolved from backend utilities into strategic assets that sit at the core of digital transformation. The growth of AI has ...
21 Jan
When it comes to building tech initiatives, we often say that they should be treated as products in order for them to succeed. Treating your internal APIs as a product means that you’re not just thinking about the utilitarian nature of your systems — you’re thinking about internal users as consumers, and thereby prioritizing the ...
20 Jan
Model Context Protocol (MCP) had a banner year in 2025. Since MCP was first released in November 2024, the protocol has exploded with thousands of public MCP servers and millions of monthly SDK downloads. Everyone from Microsoft to Google has adopted MCP in their quest for agentic AI. However, right when MCP was celebrating its ...
6 Jan
Model Context Protocol (MCP) was all the rage in the tech world in 2025 and will likely stay that way throughout 2026. MCP is changing how developers bridge the gap between AI applications and local or remote data. One of these bridges is the MCP server, which exposes capabilities to AI applications through tools, resources, ...
31 Dec 2025
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was published in November 2024 and has seen tremendous success and adoption. That is not a big surprise, as AI is still very much trending, and MCP has turned into the glue that allows LLM-based applications to interact with resources and tools. Without MCP, LLMs remain in their closed worlds ...
30 Dec 2025
In the interconnected digital landscape, software applications communicate through layers of application programming interfaces (APIs). For architects responsible for steering large, complex systems, the move to an API-first strategy is no longer optional — it’s the bedrock for delivering resilient, scalable, and innovative digital experiences. This approach ensures that APIs are treated as first-class citizens, ...
24 Dec 2025
For as long as most of us can remember, “developer experience” has been the umbrella term when it comes to measuring the usability, reliability, and effectiveness of APIs. A great developer experience, meaning one that makes things straightforward and reduces friction as much as possible, is the gold standard. Get your DX right, and word ...
17 Dec 2025
Speaking at tech conferences can be a very fruitful professional experience. Placing yourself on stage is a fantastic way to share your ideas with the world, network with others, and build your reputation in tech. But the first hurdle is pitching a topic — selection committees look for very specific things when they review their ...
11 Dec 2025
Explore 2026 predictions on how AI agents, MCP standards, authorization, and new API models will reshape the AI-driven API economy.
9 Dec 2025
The tech space is often overly concerned with the new and flashy — it seems like every day, there is a new product release, a new iteration, some big new thing that secures headlines and coverage. But the reality is that there is a whole world of old protocols that are not only alive — ...
25 Nov 2025
If you asked ten software developers what a contract test is, you’d get twelve different answers. One might say that it’s something to do with schema validation. Another might say that it’s something to do with API specifications. Yet another might tell you that it’s got something to do with the legal profession and kindly ...
20 Nov 2025
“Is that API ready to go yet?” It’s a phrase that can strike fear in the heart of any API developer, especially if the answer to the question is “not even close.” In an ideal world, the final steps of developing an API would be making a few final tweaks and adding a bit of ...
19 Nov 2025
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) community recently made quite a splash with the introduction of the Official MCP Registry, an open catalog of available MCP servers. This open-source directory is meant as a single point of discovery for all MCP servers, helping to make MCP servers more discoverable while enforcing a standardized format. It also ...
13 Nov 2025
In modern system architectures, understanding data flow is crucial. Two fundamental concepts are north-south and east-west communications. Although both deal with APIs and services, they solve fundamentally different problems and require distinct tools. Below, we’ll explore when to use API gateways or a service mesh for north-south and east-west traffic. We’ll consider when each approach ...
12 Nov 2025
Imagine a scenario where you want to translate a sentence from English to another language. Without additional logic or processing, a simple phrase like “the cat is sitting on the mat” in English might translate to “Le chat est séance sur le tapis.” The actual translation should be “Le chat est assis sur le tapis,” ...
30 Oct 2025
Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been proliferating at the speed of thought, as more and more developers and users strive to make their AI truly agentic and independent. Without MCP, AI-driven systems like large language models (LLMs) can only make suggestions. They can save you work, but they can also create work if you have ...
28 Oct 2025
It’s not an overstatement to say that the health and fitness space has been transformed in the past couple of decades. Thanks to the introduction of wearables and trackers, keeping tabs on one’s progress no longer means manually entering weights and reps into a chalky old notebook between sets. Fitness has been streamlined, incentivized, and ...
21 Oct 2025
Agentic AI has been the talk of the tech world in 2025. A quick query on Google Trends shows a 6100% uptick in Google searches for agentic AI in the last 12 months. Emergen Research anticipates that the Agentic AI market could be worth as much as $48.2 billion by 2030, with a compound annual ...
15 Oct 2025
Healthcare systems worldwide are navigating a complex landscape, challenged by rising patient expectations, soaring operational costs, shortages of medical staff, strict compliance requirements, and the need to manage vast amounts of sensitive data. In this environment, digital transformation is essential to stop accepting what’s broken and start building what works. A pivotal standard driving transformation ...
9 Oct 2025
“So it happened, Scott. An MCP server I use in one of my workflows shipped a breaking API change, and my entire workflow broke.” With this single line, Scott Feinberg illuminates a core problem that the excitement around Model Context Protocol (MCP) has fundamentally ignored: API versioning. APIs change all the time — that’s what ...