Open standards are one of the foundational pillars of building distributed systems. For example, the OpenAPI (formerly Swagger) specification, as an industry standard to define RESTful APIs, has been instrumental to the success of distributed architectures such as microservices. It has enabled a proliferation of tooling to support building, testing and monitoring RESTful APIs. However, such standardizations have been largely missing in distributed systems for event-driven APIs.
AsyncAPI is an open source initiative to create a much needed event-driven and asynchronous API standardization and development tooling. The AsyncAPI specification, inspired by the OpenAPI specification, describes and documents event-driven APIs in a machine-readable format. It's protocol agnostic, so it can be used for APIs that work over many protocols, including MQTT, WebSockets, and Kafka. We're eager to see the ongoing improvements of AsyncAPI and further maturity of its tooling ecosystem.
