Every company that has shipped APIs long enough reaches a moment that feels like a phase change. At some point — usually between the fortieth and sixtieth API — the estate stops behaving like a collection of useful services and starts behaving like a liability. Authentication schemes diverge. Pagination works three different ways depending on which team wrote the endpoint. Error responses range from structured JSON to unceremonious five-hundred-error HTML. A customer integrating against two of your APIs has to write twice as much code to handle the inconsistencies as they do to handle the actual business logic.

That moment is the one where governance becomes unavoidable.…