he Future many different APIs brought together to create something new. As an example, one could take the photo APIs of Flickr and the mapping APIs of Google and put them together to make a visual tour application. How do APIs impact the telecom industry's shift to software? Late in the 2000s, the telecom industry started exposing APIs to customers and third parties for short message service (SMS) and multimedia messaging service (MMS) messaging and to control calls through applications built by third parties. Facebook was one of the biggest users of these SMS and MMS gateways. An example of this is when an entity like Twilio provides telephony APIs, it makes it possible for application developers of mobile applications or games to incorporate voice communications in unique ways. In the NFV/SDN context, APIs are also valuable. Within the virtual infrastructure management (VIM) layer of an NFV environment, when APIs are exposed from a VIM (like the OpenStack framework), a developer of automation workflows can lean on standard provisioning APIs for creat- ing virtual machines (VMs), block storage, and local networks for setting up applications or VNFs. This API exposure within the NFV environment allows for the end-to-end automation of network functions through their lifecycle from instantiation, through scaling and descaling, modification, and deletion. The broad adoption of APIs in telecom adds a new type of service whereby the developer is the customer. This is an example of generative innovation, where a broad ecosystem of developers can build upon a variety of exposed services via APIs to create new applications and new mashups. One of the difficulties of API "exposure" is around how often they get changed, how the changes are communicated, and how others who expose the same or similar API, are changing or not chang- ing the API. When system designers rely on APIs, there is a natural tendency to want an API to stay static and consistent wherever and whenever they are exposed. This is inevitably a place where s