The Linux Foundation announced Wednesday it will host the AsyncAPI Initiative. AsyncAPI is a specification and a suite of open source tools that work with asynchronous APIs and event-driven architectures. It is the fastest-growing API specification according to a recent developer survey, tripling in production usage from 2019 to 2020.

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“As the growth of AsyncAPI skyrocketed, it became clear to us that we needed to find a neutral, trusted home for its ongoing development,” Fran Méndez, AsyncAPI creator said in a statement. “The Linux Foundation is without question the leader in bringing together interested communities to advance technology and accelerate adoption in an open way.”

AsyncAPI helps unify documentation automation and code generation, as well as managing, testing and monitoring asynchronous APIs. It provides language for describing the interface of event-driven systems regardless of the underlying technology and supports the full development cycle of event-driven architecture. AsyncAPI is considered a sister project of the OpenAPI Initiative, which is focused on synchronous REST communication and is also hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Founding sponsors of the AsyncAPI Initiative—Ably Realtime, Apideck, Bump, IQVIA Technologies, MuleSoft, Slack, Solace and TIBCO, and AsyncAPI—recently announced a partnership with Postman, a collaboration platform for API development. Today, AsyncAPI is in production at Adidas, PayPal, Salesforce, SAP, and Slack, as well as other enterprise environments. 

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“AsyncAPI joining the Linux Foundation is the final cornerstone in the foundation of the open source event-driven API specification,” Kin Lane, Postman’s API evangelist, said in a statement. “This creates solid groundwork for defining the next generation of API infrastructure, beginning with HTTP request and response APIs, but also event-driven approaches spanning multiple protocols and patterns including Kafka, GraphQL, MQTT, AMQP and much more. And all of that, in turn, will provide what is needed to power documentation, mocking, testing and other critical stops along a modern enterprise API lifecycle.”

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware.  

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