Snyk’s shift left approach to API development

Snyk applies its shift-left DevSecOps philosophy to API development by giving developers early, automated feedback on OpenAPI-defined REST APIs, helping improve delivery speed, security, consistency, and usability. To standardize its growing API-first platform, the company created an API Stylebook and initially used peer pull-request reviews, but recognized that manual reviews can be slow and prone to inconsistency in a distributed organization. Snyk therefore introduced local and CI-integrated linting based on shared rules, allowing developers to identify compliance issues before manual review. After finding conventional pattern-based linting insufficient for expressing evolving API standards, Snyk partnered with Optic to develop Optic CI, which uses a TypeScript-based rules language and evaluates changes between API versions rather than only static specifications. This approach is intended to support continuous API improvement without accumulating excessive exceptions, with future work planned around API version management.

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