Fostering SLA-Driven API Specifications

Abstract

Software architecture tendencies are shifting to a microservice paradigm. In this context, RESTful APIs are being established the standard of integration. API designer often identifies two key issues to be competitive in such growing market. On the one hand, the generation of accurate documentation of the behavior and capabilities of the API to promote its usage; on the other hand, the design of a pricing plan that fits into the potential API user’s needs. Besides the increasing number of API modeling alternatives is emerging, there is a lack of proposals on the definition of flexible pricing plans usually contained in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper we propose two different modeling techniques for the description of SLA in a RESTful API context: iAgree and SLA4OAI.