What is API Contract?
An API contract turns an interface from tribal knowledge into a versioned artifact. It enables client-generated code, compatibility checks in CI, and consumer-driven contract tests. For inter-team coordination it is one of the highest-leverage documentation pieces an architecture can own.
Related terms
- Event Channel — A named, typed stream of events (often Kafka topic or equivalent) through which services publish and subscribe asynchronously.
- Microservices — An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, independently deployable services organized around business capabilities.