The APIs.io network added a new layer this week — arazzo.apis.io — to index the workflows API providers expose, not just the endpoints. It joins the catalog as its own Workflows section in the More dropdown across every site in the network, sitting alongside the OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, and JSON-LD specification layers.
Arazzo is the OpenAPI Initiative’s specification for describing ordered, multi-step API workflows — the actual sequences of calls that get something done, with inputs threaded into requests, outputs chained between steps, success criteria, and branching. OpenAPI tells you what operations exist; Arazzo tells you how to use them together.
The headline counts after the first index pass:
| Layer | Specs | Providers | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider-specific workflows | 4,285 | 347 | Each top-tier provider’s arazzo/ folder |
| Cross-provider workflows | 255 | 54 spanned | Hand-authored, orchestrating multiple providers |
| Total | 4,540 | — | — |
Two kinds of workflow
Provider-specific workflows describe the most valuable multi-step flows within a single API. Across the network’s 347 top-tier providers — the exemplar and strong tiers of the catalog — that’s 4,285 Arazzo documents. An Airtable flow that reads a base schema, lists records, then branches to update-or-create. A Stripe flow that creates a PaymentIntent and polls it to a terminal status. An Amazon HealthLake flow that starts a FHIR import job and loops on DescribeFHIRImportJob until it completes. Each is generated straight from the operations the provider already publishes in its OpenAPI.
Cross-provider workflows are the more interesting half: 255 specs that orchestrate operations across two or three different providers, spanning 54 of them. These are the integrations everyone actually builds but nobody describes in a machine-readable way:
- Charge a customer with Stripe, then email a receipt with SendGrid.
- New CRM contact in HubSpot → subscribe in Mailchimp → tag in ActiveCampaign.
- Sysdig vulnerability scan → open a GitHub issue → notify Slack.
- Run a dbt job → query Snowflake → write the results to a Google Sheet.
- Provision a Microsoft Entra user → add to a group → post a welcome to Slack.
They cover fourteen themes — payments-to-communications, CRM↔marketing sync, e-commerce, multi-channel messaging, AI enrichment chains, identity provisioning, DevOps and incident response, data pipelines, ITSM, finance and spend, social publishing, security and observability, internal productivity, and geo/weather.
Grounded in real operations
Every step in every workflow — provider and cross-provider alike — references a real operationId confirmed to exist in the referenced provider’s OpenAPI. The cross-provider specs declare their sourceDescriptions as raw-GitHub URLs back into each provider’s catalog entry, so a step like:
operationId: $sourceDescriptions.stripeApi.postPaymentIntents
resolves to an operation that actually ships in Stripe’s payment-intents spec. Nothing is invented. Where a provider splits its OpenAPI across dozens of per-resource files (Stripe alone has ~60), the right file and id were pinned for each step.
What’s on each page
Every workflow gets its own page with the full Arazzo document rendered inline, plus a structured view of:
- Workflows and steps — each step’s id, the operation it calls, and what it does.
- Source API descriptions — the OpenAPI specs the workflow orchestrates, with links.
- Providers orchestrated — chips linking each spanned provider back to its providers.apis.io profile.
The listing puts cross-provider workflows and provider-specific workflows side by side, with a single filter across both — so the variety of what’s possible reads at a glance.
Why this layer
The network has spent a long time describing APIs one at a time — providers, APIs, schemas, events. Arazzo is the first layer that describes how they compose. That’s exactly the shape an agent needs: not “here are 19,000 operations,” but “here is the four-step sequence that takes a payment and confirms it, and here is the real operation behind each step.” Workflows are where API discovery stops being a card catalog and starts being a set of executable recipes.
Browse them at arazzo.apis.io.