Linux Foundation Will Host AsyncAPI to Support Growth and Collaboration for Industry’s Fastest-Growing API Spec

The open specification for defining asynchronous APIs gains momentum, seeks neutral home for open governance, community growth and industry adoption

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 30, 2021 –  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host the AsyncAPI Initiative. AsyncAPI is a specification and a suite of open source tools that work with asynchronous APIs and event-driven architectures. It is the fastest-growing API specification according to a recent developer survey, tripling in production usage from 2019 to 2020.

Founding sponsors of the AsyncAPI Initiative include Ably Realtime, Apideck, Bump, IQVIA Technologies, Slack, Solace, and TIBCO, and AsyncAPI recently announced a partnership with Postman. Today, AsyncAPI is in production at Adidas, PayPal, Salesforce, SAP, and Slack, among other enterprise environments.

“As the growth of AsyncAPI skyrocketed, it became clear to us that we needed to find a neutral, trusted home for its ongoing development. The Linux Foundation is without question the leader in bringing together interested communities to advance technology and accelerate adoption in an open way,” said Fran Méndez, who created AsyncAPI in 2016. “This natural next step for the project really represents the maturity and strength of AsyncAPI. We expect the open governance model architected and standardized by the Linux Foundation will ensure the initiative continues to thrive.”

AsyncAPI helps unify documentation automation and code generation, as well as managing, testing, and monitoring asynchronous APIs. It provides language for describing the interface of event-driven systems regardless of the underlying technology and supports the full development cycle of event-driven architecture.  The event-driven AsyncAPI is considered a sister project of the OpenAPI Initiative, which is focused on synchronous REST communication and is also hosted by Linux Foundation.

“The Linux Foundation is pleased to provide a forum where individuals and organizations can come together to advance AsyncAPI and nurture collaboration in a neutral forum that can support the kind of growth this community is experiencing,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and Vice President, Developer Relations at the Linux Foundation.

For more information, please visit: https://www.asyncapi.org

Supporting Quotes

Łukasz Górnicki, AsyncAPI

“AsyncAPI at Linux Foundation is another brick needed to build a solid and sustainable community for the project. We are securing a perimeter for AsyncAPI and can focus on expanding the vision of making all the specs work together for the user’s good.”

Bill Doerrfeld, NordicAPIs

“Open standards are only as strong as their community effort. The details of the AsyncAPI charter represent their ongoing community mission and goal to retain vendor neutrality around the format. AsyncAPI is taking an active role in enacting this by limiting company representation per TSC, privileging work over money, and other strategies.”

Kin Lane, Postman

“AsyncAPI joining the Linux Foundation is the final cornerstone in the foundation of the open source event-driven API specification. Laying the foundation for defining the next generation of API infrastructure beginning with HTTP request and response APIs, but also event-driven approaches spanning multiple protocols and patterns including Kafka, GraphQL, MQTT, AMQP, and much more. Providing what is needed to power documentation, mocking, testing, and other critical stops along a modern enterprise API lifecycle.”

Matt McLarty, Salesforce

“Seeing how AsyncAPI has blossomed has been incredible. Its progress has been guided by two key principles in my opinion: a focus on solving real world problems, and a focus on community. As the world of synchronous APIs and event-based communication converges, AsyncAPI plays a vital role in levelling the API playing field.”

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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