AEP's 2025 Roadmap - Building Momentum
As we begin 2025, we want to share our ambitions for the API Enhancement Proposals (AEP) project. After a successful 2024 that saw the launch of several key tools and growing community engagement, our focus for 2025 is on stabilizing the specification while expanding the ecosystem of tools.
Specification and Standards
A major milestone for 2025 will be the v0.1 release of the AEP specification. This represents the culmination of much work to adapt and expand the original API Improvement Proposals, with particular focus on resource-oriented design patterns that work across both Protocol Buffers and HTTP APIs. The 0.1 release will include support for the standard methods, long-running operations (LRO), and other design patterns supported across our toolchain.
Tooling Releases
Building on the specification, we will be releasing initial versions of core tools in 2025:
- A production-ready version of the OpenAPI linter with coverage of the standard methods, list-related patterns, and LROs of the 0.1 specification
- An enhanced Protocol Buffer linter reflecting the latest AEP guidance
- aepcli with LRO support of the 0.1 specification
- The first official release of our Terraform provider
- A stable release of aep-explorer for visually navigating AEP-compliant APIs
Community Growth
In May, we plan on giving a talk about aep.dev at API Days New York. The video will be released online for those who would like to view but cannot attend.
Building on the success of our 2024 barn raising, we are planning another community event after the 0.1 specification release. This will focus on helping organizations learn about the specification, enabling adoption of our specification and tools, and onboarding interested contributors to the project.
Longer-Term Goals
In the second half of 2025, we’ll focus on:
- Stabilizing and potentially releasing version 0.1 of aepc, our toolkit for generating service stubs from resource definitions
- Expanding existing tooling based on real-world usage and feedback
- Expanding and refining guidance
Whether you are building new APIs or working to improve existing ones, 2025 will be an exciting year to get involved with AEPs! Join us in our mission to make APIs more consistent and maintainable across many industries.
Get Involved
Join us:
- On CNCF Slack in the #aep channel
- At our weekly community meetings (Fridays at 11:30am PT)
- Through our documentation at aep.dev
- On GitHub at github.com/aep-dev