Towards SLA modeling for RESTful APIs

Abstract

The term of API Economy is becoming increasingly used to describe the change of vision in how APIs can add value to the organizations. Furthermore, a greater automation of RESTful APIs management can suppose a competitive advantage for the company. New proposals are emerging in order to automatize some API governance tasks and increase the ease of use (e.g. generation of code and documentation). Despite that, the non-functional aspects are often addressed in a highly specific manner or even there not exists any solution for an automatic governance. Nevertheless, these properties are already defined in natural language at the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that both customer and provided have established. In this paper, we carry out a study on the *aaS industry and analyze the current both API modeling and SLA modeling proposals in order to identify the open challenges for an automatic RESTful API governance.