Cisco DevNet presents at API Days Paris 2023

Year after year, this global event for API practitioners gets bigger. This year the event was held in the newly renovated CNIT Forest -a central and easy to join location in the Paris La Defense business area. Many of us were amazed by the number of talks and exhibitors showing their latest advances in API Design, API Management, and Event Driven Management gateways and the many discussions around OpenAPI, JSON-Schema, and GraphQL.

As a sponsor of API Days Paris, Cisco DevNet -Cisco's developer program -offered a booth where we engage 100+ conversations with attendees and discussed how to build and publish robust APIs, sharing our experience driving API Quality and Security initiatives. (We also had the opportunity to meet and, for some of us, play chess with Laurent Fressinet, the two-time French Chess Champion, and 'second assistant' with opening preparation during Magnus Carlsen' World Chess Championship matches. But that's a different story.)

The importance of API Contracts

DevNet offered 2 talks explaining the importance of API Contracts, how we are evaluating and scoring our APIs internally, and also the challenges that come with the lifecycle and management of OpenAPI documents (see resources below for recordings and slides).

We were able to show why and how a successful API-first strategy not only encourages consistent practices when designing, versioning, and documenting APIs, but also lets you look into testing and observing live traffic to ensure APIs behave as per their contract.

Schedule a live Panoptica demo

In this regard, we offered demonstrations of the latest version of Panoptica -Cisco Cloud Application Security solution -with a particular focus on API Security. If you are interested in this topic, we encourage you to schedule a live demo of Panoptica.

Related resources

For the many of you who could not attend the conference and want to further grow your skills and expertise in this domain, we've got you covered:

• Panoptica Learning Lab: This hands-on tutorial will take you all the way from zero to detecting API drifts from live traffic observations.
• Why API Contracts matter: In this talk we define what is an API Contract and the maturity model used at Cisco to evaluate the quality of API Contracts. We will then dive into strategies and OpenAPI tools to automatically score APIs.
• Managing OpenAPI Documents at scale: In this talk, we will discuss strategies for managing OpenAPI documents at scale, leveraging lessons learned from Cisco's extensive use of OpenAPI specifications across its REST API portfolio. We will delve into standardization, version control, automation, and modularization. Join this session to gain insights into challenges faced in handling very large documents, ensuring compliance, and maintaining consistency.
• Panoptica API Security 
• Blog: How Cisco is the Bridge to an API-first, Cloud Native World
• Blog: How Cisco's API-First Motion is Driving Innovation at Scale

We are looking forward to meeting again next year for API Days Paris 2024, Dec 3-5th 2024. Hope to see you there!