API Integrations — design, security & automation
API integrations connect your systems with partners and cloud services: we design contracts, build webhooks and orchestration with retries/idempotency, enforce OAuth 2.0/JWT, and provide contract tests with full observability.
Why integrations matter
Without consistent connections, data drifts between apps and processes stall. A well-designed contract, proper security and observability shorten delivery time and reduce maintenance costs.
Contract first
A spec (e.g., OpenAPI/JSON Schema) aligns teams and vendors. Changes are versioned and validated in CI.
Security built-in
OAuth 2.0, JWT, scopes and rate limiting. Least privilege and full call audit.
Resilience
Backoff retries, idempotency, DLQ and timeouts. Fewer cascaded failures, faster recovery.
API integrations — 7 steps to results
Discovery of flows
Map sources/targets, priorities and business SLAs. Choose sync, async or event-driven.
Contract specification
Resources, errors (RFC7807), pagination, versioning and payload samples. CI validation.
Security
OAuth 2.0/JWT, mTLS, limits and abuse monitoring. Secrets in KMS/Vault.
Webhooks & queuing
Signed payloads, acknowledgements, retries and queues. Tolerant of partner outages.
Orchestration
Transforms, enrichment, idempotency and compensations. Clear audit and error paths.
Testing & sandbox
Contract tests, sandbox environment and synthetic data. CI/CD gate.
Observability
Tracing, correlation with logs/metrics, connection SLOs and contextual alerts.
Contract design & security
Good specs and enforced security conventions speed up development and simplify operations.
Conventions & errors
Consistent naming, HTTP statuses, pagination, filtering and a Problem Details error model.
Access control
Use-case scopes, call audit, throttling and geofencing.
Quality & DX
Mocks, SDKs and a partner portal. Automatic contract validation and changelog.
Helpful resources: OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, OWASP API Security Top 10, Postman Platform, JSON Schema.
Connectors, webhooks & orchestration
iPaaS or custom
When iPaaS (Make/PA/Zapier) is enough — and when you need custom orchestration or an ESB.
Transformations
Field mapping, validation and enrichment. Track schema versions.
Idempotency
Dedup keys, distributed transactions and compensations on errors.
Practice: we tie contracts to runbooks and SLO-based alerts to detect and fix integration issues faster.
Testing, sandbox & observability
Contract in CI
Spec validation, conformance and regression tests. Mocks and data generators.
Traces & logs
OpenTelemetry, request correlation, sampling and quality dashboards.
KPIs
Integration MTTR, error rate, throttling and per-partner error budgets.
Engagement models & costs
Contract + PoC
Discovery, spec, mocks and the first connection in a sandbox.
Orchestration + security
Webhooks, retries, monitoring and access policies. Automated tests.
Operations
On-call, SLOs, reports and periodic contract reviews.
See also: No-code tool comparison and AIOps/SRE Monitoring.
FAQ — technical integrations
OpenAPI vs gRPC/GraphQL — which to pick?
How to secure webhooks?
What about limits and throttling?
How do we measure integration quality?
iPaaS or custom code?
How to prepare a partner?
Need to design and deliver integrations via APIs?
Short consultation (20 min) — we’ll review scope, pick the right pattern and outline a pilot.