The Arazzo Standard

About this report

Arazzo is the OpenAPI Initiative’s specification for describing multi-step API workflows — the sequence of calls that gets a job done, with inputs, outputs, success criteria and the dependencies between steps. It is well designed, it has real tooling, and it answers a problem every integrator has.

Across all of public GitHub there are 812 Arazzo documents in 163 repositories. API Evangelist alone holds 5,276 — roughly six and a half times the rest of the world combined. That comparison is worth stating plainly, and it is not the finding. The finding is what the 812 are actually for.

The real-world adoption of Arazzo is as a test format, not a description format. Rebilly ships smoke tests in it. SailPoint carries it as tooling fixtures. Speakeasy’s SDK generator emits it automatically, which is how one vendor’s customer lands in this corpus four times without anyone there having chosen Arazzo at all.

Only about ten organizations publish an Arazzo document describing their own API for the people who consume it — clustered in payments and European public infrastructure, with no large US SaaS platform among them. And the specification itself has 23 human contributors, roughly 70% of the work belonging to one person.

The method is disclosed in full, because the catalog cannot answer this question: the enrichment pipeline is instructed to author Arazzo, not to harvest it, so its zero first-party documents is a fact about the pipeline rather than about the market.

What's inside

1. Executive summary — a specification adopted for a different job
2. What Arazzo is, and what it is not
3. How adoption was measured, and what the method cannot see
4. What the 812 documents actually are
5. The ten that actually publish one
6. The other adoption, and it is the larger one
7. Why providers do not publish workflows
8. The body
9. Conformance, and the regulatory layer
10. The scoring caveat
11. What would have to be true
12. The investable thesis
13. Where this is going

What you get