API governance is the processes and collective decision-making done by stakeholders when creating and reproducing web-based APIs, aiming to create policies, rules, and conventions that allow independent but effective collaboration among parties involved. It addresses challenges such as versioning, tracking, documenting, deprecating, integrating, and managing APIs across multiple teams, cloud environments, and gateways. The benefits of API governance include standardization, consistency, and reusability, enabling decentralized API creation while guiding teams in delivering standardized APIs. An API First approach prioritizes APIs as the focal point for product creation, making them more accessible to mobile applications, client applications, and developers. This approach is gaining popularity with the rise of API-based application infrastructure and microservices. Standardizing metadata, role-based access control, common schema, machine-readable rules, and versioning schemes are essential best practices for effective API governance, ensuring standardized APIs that meet governance policies before production deployment.