I counted 47 different APIs being called by our production systems last quarter. Forty-seven. And that’s just what we could track through our network monitoring. The real number is probably closer to sixty when you account for all the shadow IT and third-party integrations that teams have spun up without telling anyone.

This is what API sprawl looks like in a mid-sized enterprise, and it’s getting worse every year.

How We Got Here

Ten years ago, most enterprises had maybe a dozen external integrations, all carefully documented and managed through enterprise service buses. Today, every SaaS tool comes with an API. Every internal microservice exposes one. Your marketing team is calling Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and three different ad platforms. Finance is talking to Xero, several banking APIs, and who knows what else.

Each integration seemed reasonable at the time. The business needed data from System A to flow into System B. A developer wrote some code, tested it, deployed it, moved on. Multiply that by a hundred decisions over several years, and you’ve got a mess.

The Problems That Emerge

Security is the obvious concern. When you’ve got dozens of API keys floating around in environment variables, config files, and god forbid hardcoded in scripts, you’re one git push away from a breach. We found API credentials in Slack channels last year. Not links to where credentials were stored. Actual credentials, pasted directly into messages.

But security isn’t the only issue. Performance becomes a nightmare when you can’t see what’s calling what. We had an incident where a batch job was making 10,000 API calls an hour to a service that rate-limited us at 5,000. Nobody knew because nobody was watching. The job just silently failed for months.

Cost is another factor. Most modern APIs charge by usage. When consumption is distributed across dozens of services with no central visibility, you can’t optimize spend. We were paying for duplicate calls to the same endpoints because three different teams had each built their own integration to the same service.

The API Management Solution

This is where API management platforms come in. At their core, they sit between your applications and the external APIs you’re calling, providing a single point of control and visibility.

The basic capabilities include authentication management, rate limiting, caching, logging, and monitoring. More advanced platforms add request transformation, response mocking, analytics, and developer portals if you’re exposing APIs to external consumers.

We evaluated several options last year. The big names were Apigee (Google), AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, and Kong. There are also newer players like Tyk and open-source options if you want to self-host.

What Actually Matters

Don’t get distracted by feature lists. Most API management vendors will try to sell you on a hundred capabilities you’ll never use. Focus on these core requirements:

Authentication and authorization need to work with your existing identity provider. If you’re on Azure AD, the platform needs native integration. Don’t accept “it’s possible with custom code” as an answer.

Observability has to be real-time and actionable. You need to see which APIs are being called, by whom, how often, response times, error rates, and costs. Dashboards that update every 15 minutes are useless when you’re debugging a production incident.

Rate limiting should be configurable at multiple levels. You might want different limits for different services or different environments. And when limits are hit, the error messages need to be clear enough that developers can fix the problem.

Policy enforcement is critical. You want to mandate that all external API calls go through the gateway. That means blocking direct connections at the network level and having the political capital to enforce the policy with teams who think they’re special.

The Implementation Reality

Here’s what nobody tells you about implementing API management: it’s a political project more than a technical one. Every team that’s built their own integrations will resist. They’ll claim their use case is unique. They’ll argue the gateway adds latency. They’ll say they don’t have time to refactor.

You need executive sponsorship. Preferably from someone who controls budget and can say “new integrations that don’t go through the gateway don’t get approved.” Without that backing, your API management platform becomes optional, and optional policies don’t work.

Start with new integrations only. Don’t try to migrate everything on day one. As teams build new features, require them to use the gateway. Set a deadline for migrating critical legacy integrations, but be realistic about it taking 12-18 months.

When to Skip It

Not every organization needs a full API management platform. If you’re a small company with fewer than ten external integrations and tight development team communication, a well-maintained spreadsheet and good security practices might suffice.

But once you cross about 20 APIs, or once you have multiple teams working independently, the sprawl becomes unmanageable without tooling. That’s when the investment pays off.

The alternative is what I see at a lot of enterprises: periodic crises when an API key leaks, mysterious performance issues that take days to debug, and a constant low-level anxiety about what’s actually running in production. That’s expensive too, just in ways that don’t show up on a budget line.

We implemented Kong six months ago, and while it was painful, I’m glad we did it. We’ve already caught two security issues, saved about $8K a month in duplicate API calls, and most importantly, I can actually answer questions about our integration architecture without saying “I think” or “probably.”

That alone was worth it.