Recent changes to this website and other news (click here for more):
- November 2025: Slides from API community conference keynote “API First with ‘Patterns for API Design’” available (PDF).
- July 2025: Eleven of our patterns are featured in the now completed “Interface Refactoring Catalog”.
- November 2022: Our patterns form the core of the book “Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges” in the Vaughn Vernon Signature series at Addison-Wesley Professional.
The MAP for Open API Design and Evolution
While much has been said about microservices in general and about supporting infrastructure architectures, the service API design has received less attention:
- How many services should be exposed remotely? What is an adequate size for them?
- How to ensure that the services provided by an API and their interactions with clients are loosely coupled? How much data should be exchanged in request and response messages? How often does this happen?
- What are the most suitable message representations? How to agree on the meaning of each message?
Answering these questions is what this website is about. Our API design pattern language is organized into categories:
Foundation
Responsibility
Structure
Quality
Evolution
Eager to get going? Looking for more context and background information?
- This presentation and the cheat sheet are good places to get started. Several tutorials are available. The resources page suggests additional entry points.
- A follow-up project yielded an online API refactoring catalog, with patterns serving as refactoring targets.
- Selected patterns are implemented in the Lakeside Mutual sample application (see here). Lakeside Mutual is a fictitious insurance company that implemented its core business capabilities for customer, contract, and risk management as a set of microservices with corresponding application frontends.
- The Microservice Domain Specific Language (MDSL) and its tools features all patterns in combination.
- The Stepwise Service Design activity proposed in the Software/Service/API Design Practice Repository (DPR) leverages many of our patterns.1
Guidance and Pointers
You can continue reading about MAP and related topics on any of these pages:
Feedback and input is appreciated! Contact us.
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DPR is a public repository of methods and practices that are applicable to service analysis and design, collected and curated by two of the MAP authors. DPR comes as a Leanpub ebook too, also available in a bundle with the Software Architecture Lecture Notes by a third MAPer. ↩