OpenAPI-first design — Use case

Draft an OpenAPI spec; the gateway turns it into a governed proxy. One-click generation, contract-driven mocks, and partner-ready portals — without writing service code.

Developers · Design · For developers

Spec first. Proxy second. Service third.

Apinizer's API Designer takes an OpenAPI draft, generates a governed proxy, ships a mock, and lists the endpoint in the partner portal — before any service exists.

Five-minute quickstart · Open API Designer

The problem

The problem

Most teams write specs after they ship. That's how contracts drift.

Engineers ship the service, then write the OpenAPI to match — and the spec ages out the first time a feature ships without a doc update. Apinizer flips the order: the spec is the source of truth. Proxy, mock, portal, contract test — all derived from it. Drift is impossible because there's nowhere for it to live.

Capabilities

Spec authoring in-platform

Draft OpenAPI 3.x in the platform. Reviewers leave comments in place; the spec is the working document, not the export.

One-click proxy generation

Generate a governed proxy from the spec. Auth, rate limits, validation defaults applied — engineers tune from a starting point that's already correct.

Contract-driven mocks

Mock API generated from the same spec. Frontend, partners, and contract tests unblock immediately.

Validation in production

Request and response validation enforced at the gateway against the spec. Bad payloads rejected at the edge with clean errors.

Spec governance

Required fields, naming conventions, deprecation hygiene — checked on every PR. The platform team encodes the rules once; every team gets the lift.

Multi-protocol bridges

OpenAPI fronting a SOAP backend, a gRPC service, or a stored procedure — the proxy translates the contract on the way through.

Real-world examples

Banking

Scenario: Istanbul bank ships every new endpoint as a spec PR first

Outcome: Spec lands in Git; CI runs lint and policy checks. On merge, the proxy and mock generate; partners onboard against the mock the same day.

Manufacturing

Scenario: Munich OEM unifies 14 plant teams on one spec template

Outcome: Every plant's APIs follow the same naming, the same auth, the same versioning. New plant onboarded in days, not quarters.

Public sector

Scenario: Stockholm agency enforces national-standard fields on every spec

Outcome: Required citizen-ID format, mandatory consent flag, audit-tag — checked in CI. Specs that miss a required field fail review.

Telecom

Scenario: Madrid carrier auto-generates partner portal pages from spec

Outcome: Portal pages, code samples, and contract tests all derived from the spec. Partner docs never go stale.

Retail

Scenario: Amsterdam marketplace runs validation at the edge to reject bad payloads

Outcome: Pre-existing services kept doing partial validation; Apinizer's spec-driven validation rejects bad calls before backends see them.

Insurance

Scenario: Milan insurer translates legacy SOAP backends through OpenAPI proxies

Outcome: Designer specs map to SOAP operations. Modern consumers see clean REST; the legacy backend never changes.

Healthcare

Scenario: Prague hospital ships FHIR-aligned specs as the contract source

Outcome: FHIR resources mapped in the spec; downstream EHR translation handled by the proxy. Vendor connectors interoperate by construction.

Government

Scenario: Baku ministry enforces deprecation hygiene in spec linting

Outcome: Deprecation policy: each operation must declare a sunset date. CI rejects specs without one; the ministry catches debt before it ships.

Recommended modules

API Designer — Spec-first authoring with one-click proxy and mock generation.
API Gateway — Runtime that validates against the spec on every request.
Mock API — Contract-driven mocks generated from the same OpenAPI document.
API Portal — Auto-generated partner portal pages from the spec.

Resources

OpenAPI-first overview — Spec authoring, proxy generation, mock generation, validation behavior.
API Designer product — Where specs live, get reviewed, and ship from.
APIops manifests — Promote specs across environments without changes.
API Reference — Browse every generated reference for Manager and APIops.
Analytics Engine — Per-spec, per-version traffic and validation telemetry.
Architecture overview — Where Designer, Gateway, Mock, and Portal compose.

API lifecycle management — For platform teams
APIops (CI/CD) — For developers
Mock APIs — For developers
Connector library (15+) — For developers

Next step

Spec is the contract

Ship from OpenAPI. Govern by default.

A 30-minute walkthrough — draft, generate, mock, govern — on a Kubernetes of your choice.

Book a Demo · Read the docs