According to GitLab’s 2021 Developer Survey, CI/CD leads the charge in DevOps, DevSecOps, and agile environments — helping developers do more, faster, with fewer resources than ever before. When we think about today’s CI/CD pipeline, we envision rapid iterations, constant Git dumps, and unparalleled deployment speeds. Above all, we think about automation. It’s the glue in your tech stack, and it’s the icing on the SDLC cake. From testing to production, automation is an enabler of rapid deployments. Yet, to fully automate the deployment of any app or service, you need to automate your API deployments. After all, modern apps rely heavily on APIs for HTTP requests, so any attempts to expedite services deployment is quickly hindered by ad-hoc, manually-driven API deployments.

So how do you automate your API deployments? Better yet, how do you effectively integrate API deployment into your CI/CD pipeline?

Why Automate API Deployment?

The goal of Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is always the same. You want to push apps from testing to deployment in seconds — not weeks. RESTful APIs are critical levers of cloud computing, so manually-driven API deployments can slow down your entire CI/CD pipeline — impacting downstream automation efforts and minimizing the value of IaC strategies.
To keep things simple, automating API deployment enables you to automate overall app deployment. The average organization is working with hundreds of APIs. And each environment (e.g., testing, staging, production, dev, etc.) typically has its own API manager. So, as you push apps through the stages, you need to ensure API configurations and changes remain consistent throughout environments. Otherwise, your developers still need to stop, make manual changes, and check for errors for every app iteration, effectively dismissing other CI/CD investments.

3 Steps to Automate API Deployment

To keep things simple and concise, let’s cover the three main steps involved in API automation. Of course, we can’t give a step-by-step guide, since every organization is working in different environments and ecosystems. So, these steps can be broadly applied to any cloud environment, API manager, or IT ecosystem.

1. Use Automate API Testing
Before you think about automating API deployment, you need a consistent and repeatable way to test APIs across each environment. We recently discussed some common methods of API testing in a blog post, but you’ll also need to use unit and integration tests — which are likely already part of your CI/CD stack.

For those without a robust CI/CD ecosystem, automated testing can be challenging. Not only will you lack some common testing tools (e.g., OpenShift, Kubernetes, unit testing tools, etc.) But you will likely lack the processes required to properly leverage shift-left testing automation. So, it’s important to build out your CI/CD ecosystem before embarking on your API automation journey.

2. Embrace CI/CD Principles for API Deployment
CI/CD involves tools, processes, and mindsets. You can onboard the latest and greatest technologies and build out hyper-complex stacks, but unless you have the right principles in place, your automation CI/CD journey will stop before it begins. We won’t dive too deep into topics like DevSecOps, shift-left, and agile. But, at the very least, you should already be practicing code dumps via Git (or another similar service), proper version control, and automated testing across those smaller code differentials.

Automating API deployment is similar to automating the deployment of any app. You need to practice the proper CI/CD techniques and have a robust automated testing environment before you start. Otherwise, you’ll end up deploying buggy, user-impacting solutions.

3. Use API Deployment Automation Tools (or Build Your Own)
Believe it or not, actually automating deployment is relatively easy. Your cloud environment likely already provides some API deployment automation tools (e.g., Azure API Management, Apache Maven, Gradle, CircleCI, etc.) These tools are all easy-to-use and should be action-ready after a quick documentation review. Of course, you can also build out your own tools, but this typically only makes sense for unique environments or for companies handling many thousands of APIs.

In other words, deploying APIs automatically isn’t challenging. But to get to this point, you need to already practice CI/CD. You can’t automate deployments without regularly pushing code to GitHub repositories or using API testing solutions.