ucas-link API strategy

Key milestones

odbc-link will be decommissioned in December 2023.
UCAS has recommended that all odbc-link users migrate to xml-link, which will remain in place until the new ucas-link achieves feature parity.
We will be building a new RESTful based link product called ucas-link.

Self-service – to provide the best customer experience, our customers should be able to access a portal providing tutorials and documentation, including onboarding instructions.
Flexibility – our APIs should not mimic our underlying systems or structures, they should form a layer of abstraction; treating them this way will offer us greater flexibility to make internal changes and create new features.
Language agnostic – our customers should be free to use the technologies of their choice to integrate with our APIs.
Governance – our APIs must support our Enterprise Architecture Standards in all key areas, e.g. security, compliance, access control, monitoring, logging.
Well-defined – each of our APIs should be independent, so we can change them without impacting others and achieve a high degree of reuse.

Our ucas-link API strategy will focus on three core building blocks:

API security – ensure robust security controls to protect against unauthorised access and vulnerabilities.
API management – have robust API management to ensure we achieve our goals in an efficient and effective manner.
API design – APIs must be well-defined and follow industry standards to achieve ease of use and flexibility of change.