AsyncAPI Initiative

We're on a mission to standardize message-based communication and increase interoperability of the different types of messaging systems available.

The messaging world is full of schema formats and protocols. Some of us prefer to use a combination of Google's protobuf with AMQP, or Avro with Kafka, or Avro with MQTT, or protobuf with MQTT, … you guessed it.

In production systems, it's common to find REST APIs, GraphQL APIs, and message-driven APIs working together. All of them serving as different interaction layers for the same data/operations. REST is usually defined using the OpenAPI specification, GraphQL has its own built-in schema language, and message-driven APIs now have AsyncAPI.

AsyncAPI is a common language for all the different protocols and schema formats, but we need to make it easy for developers to create new message-driven systems, in their programming language of choice. A quick calculation takes us to 120 possible combinations, assuming we create tooling for 6 programming languages (e.g., Java, Node.js, Go, Python, PHP, and Ruby), 4 schema formats (OpenAPI schemas, JSON Schema, Protobuf, and Avro), and 5 protocols (AMQP 0-9-1, AMQP 1.0, MQTT, Kafka, and WebSockets). We know it's a huge challenge, but we accept it 💪

REST APIs have OpenAPI. Messaging has AsyncAPI.