QCon London 2026: Managing Asynchronous APIs at Scale
The world of software development is constantly evolving, and one of the most significant trends in recent years has been the rise of event-driven architectures. At QCon London 2026, Ian Cooper, a senior principal engineer at Just Eat Takeaway, presented a compelling case for managing asynchronous APIs at scale. Cooper's talk, 'Managing Asynchronous APIs at Scale', highlighted the challenges and opportunities associated with this approach, and offered a comprehensive set of solutions for organizations looking to adopt this paradigm.
One of the key challenges Cooper identified was the informal evolution of event-driven architectures in their early stages. Teams often rely on shared knowledge to understand which services publish events, which services consume them, and how messages flow through the system. However, as organizations scale, this informal approach becomes increasingly fragile. Integration points become difficult to discover, consumers are unknown to producers, and undocumented schema changes can break downstream systems.
To address these challenges, Cooper outlined a set of emerging practices for managing asynchronous APIs in large organizations, organized around three pillars: discovery, governance, and provisioning. Central to this approach is the use of explicit specifications for messaging interfaces, such as AsyncAPI and xRegistry, which provide machine-readable ways to describe event contracts.
These specifications include topics, payload schemas, and message metadata, enabling teams to document ownership and improve discoverability across distributed systems. Cooper joked that 'binary binding is not really binary and structured binding is not really structured', highlighting the importance of standardized event metadata and schema governance. Formats such as CloudEvents can provide consistent metadata across messaging systems, while schema registries allow teams to validate event structures and manage compatibility as schemas evolve.
Cooper also emphasized the importance of automation and a change of mindset. Tooling and adoption is still very hard, and getting teams to write and maintain specifications requires cultural change, not just tooling. In mature event-driven platforms, endpoint specifications can serve as the source of truth, and from these definitions, tooling like AsyncAPI can generate code artifacts, automatically register schemas, and provision messaging infrastructure.
Cooper highlighted the benefits of tools such as EventCatalog in making asynchronous APIs and event-driven systems visible, discoverable, and governable at scale. This new approach reduces manual coordination between teams and provides architects with greater visibility and control over complex event flows in production environments.
The speaker closed the session with a demo using Marmot as an open-source example, and reminded the audience of the importance of treating async APIs with the same rigor as sync APIs. Cooper's presentation was a thought-provoking and insightful look at the challenges and opportunities associated with managing asynchronous APIs at scale, and offered a comprehensive set of solutions for organizations looking to adopt this paradigm.
In my opinion, Cooper's presentation was a must-see for anyone interested in the future of software development. His insights and practical advice were invaluable, and his emphasis on the importance of standardization and automation was particularly compelling. As organizations continue to scale and adopt event-driven architectures, Cooper's work will undoubtedly play a significant role in shaping the future of this exciting field.
