Azure service teams should use companion documents, Azure REST API Guidelines and Considerations for Service Design, when building or modifying their services. These documents provide a refined set of guidance targeted specifically for Azure services. For more information please refer to the README in the Azure folder.

Microsoft Graph service teams should reference the companion document, Graph REST API Guidelines when building or modifying their services.

In the process of building many of Microsoft's highest scale services, the Microsoft Graph team found the Microsoft API guidelines tremendously useful as a baseline. However, there are several areas where we need to provide more clarity on how developers should describe their APIs. The companion document, Graph REST API Guidelines is a set of amendments and clarifications for Microsoft Graph that act as further reading. Recognizing that two documents is a lot for a new API designer to absorb, our plan is to follow the approach Azure have taken and roll out guidelines for Microsoft Graph into a single consolidated document.

The Microsoft REST API Guidelines are Microsoft's internal company-wide REST API design guidelines. Teams at Microsoft typically reference this document when setting API design policy. They may additionally create documents specific to their team, adding further guidance or making adjustments as appropriate to their circumstances.

We publish these guidelines here with the aim of fostering dialogue and learning in the API community at large. We further hope that these guidelines may encourage other organizations to create guidelines that are appropriate for them and in turn, if they are able, to publish theirs.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

This repository contains a collection of documents and related materials supporting the overall Microsoft REST API Guidelines initiative. To contribute to this repository, please see the contribution guidelines.