Over the past 5 years, VMware has aggressively pursued a “hybrid cloud” strategy, acquiring or creating nearly 50 new products along the way, each with their own distinct set of APIs. Many of the acquired companies already had their own developer portals, while the homegrown product teams often had no idea where to begin, and almost all of them were working in silos.

At VMware {code}, part of our job is to “herd cats at scale” across these silos so we can deliver a cohesive, consistent developer experience. Our API the Docs journey started with a mission to build a better API browser for our ecosystem, but we’ve ended up with a scalable framework for delivering developer portals as-a-service that can manage the complexity of our API bestiary while allowing product teams to preserve their autonomy.

This “Dev Center” framework collects API docs, code samples, and other resources from a common set of services, and automatically generates an entire developer portal (“dev center”) based on a scope that can be defined automatically or selectively by product teams and developers based on product affiliation, user entitlements and other facets. Contributors get complete control over content management with an admin UI that’s as easy to use as WordPress, along with the option to enable continuous deployment of API docs directly from the build chain.

Our first go-to-market partner for the Dev Center framework was VMware Cloud on AWS, and our “Eureka!” moment came when we saw first-hand how transformative it was for our customers to start experimenting with our APIs immediately instead of having to install and configure a mountain of complex components. As part of this talk, we will share the results of our rollout with the AWS team and provide an in-depth walkthrough of the VMware Cloud on AWS dev center in a live environment so attendees can see the solution first-hand. Time allowing, we will also provide a sneak peek at our plan to integrate the framework in VMware Cloud itself so that product teams can implement their own in-product dev centers with zero lines of code, and so that developers get a unified view of APIs across all the services they subscribe to.