Microsoft has publicly shared its REST API design guidelines, the internal rules that its developers use to create cloud services.
The guidelines recently became available on Github.
“It’s our hope that by contributing our [guidelines] to the community conversation, we can add to the body of community knowledge and reusable content so that anyone can draw upon more collective knowledge when looking to set standards and guidelines within their organization,” reads a post on one of the company’s developer blogs.
Microsoft said the guidelines were created after hearing feedback from developers that APIs—the standardized building blocks of software development—should be consistent across all Microsoft services.
“Developers didn’t care that an API to work with an Azure virtual machine and an API to work with a user’s Office 365 documents were developed by different parts of the company, they were both from Microsoft and developers expected consistency.”
Click here to view the guidelines. Developers can also check out the APIs created with the guidelines via Microsoft Graph, a single endpoint for calling APIs for multiple Microsoft services.