Manage the entire API lifecycle with tools for API design, monetization, documentation, and more.
API management is a comprehensive discipline that encompasses the full spectrum of tools, processes, and strategies required to efficiently design, deploy, secure, monitor, and monetize APIs at scale. It enables organizations to streamline the development lifecycle while ensuring consistency, governance, and high performance across all API interactions. With robust API management, teams can create standardized interfaces, enforce access policies, track usage with in-depth analytics, and provide clear, developer-friendly documentation. It also supports business growth by enabling monetization models, developer engagement through portals, and seamless integration with internal and external systems. As APIs become the backbone of modern digital ecosystems, API management plays a critical role in maintaining control, visibility, and agility across distributed architectures.
The digital shift results in a vast amount of customer data, such as their actions, purchases, and payment methods. APIs transmit most of these transactions, enabling tracking of geolocation, device transactions, and app types. This data can be analyzed to predict future behavior or provide personalized experiences.
WebSocket APIs enable the creation of secure, real-time communication applications without provisioning or managing servers for connections or large-scale data exchanges.
This use case is about integrating legacy systems with modern digital channels like web applications, mobile applications, and IoT devices. APIs facilitate the decoupling of modern digital channels from legacy systems and enable easy communication between channels.
This use case focuses on microservices architecture, which requires interaction with multiple services. API gateways, part of API management solutions, facilitate easy developer consumption of microservices as managed APIs and help manage API traffic.
Despite a focus on security, data breaches still occur. Enterprises must focus on their security strategy, as APIs have become a leading threat vector for application security. By setting security alerts and thresholds at the gateway layer, more threats can be stopped before they reach your systems, enhancing the overall security for API-driven applications.
Here is a comprehensive API Management requirements checklist you can use to further define your use case.
Provides authentication for users making calls to the APIs.
Enables API lifecycle automation, and therefore, faster deployments of APIs with fewer tradeoffs for speed over quality.
Must have mediation capabilities that help with dynamic discovery, integration, while providing a high degree of scalability and flexibility.
Must come with a user interface that has an integrated test tool for generating test reports.
Must provide features to enable/disable API access.
Offers low pricing options based on the expected adoption of the tool and future usage growth.
Must allow features to be added to the APIs at runtime with the help of configurable files.
Provides message-level security to check for injection or DDoS attacks.
Must make it easier for developers to find, understand, and get access to different APIs.
Must have features for traffic and quota management.
Must have a space for API evangelists to engage with peers, developers, and API consumers, and build and operate communities to help with knowledge exchange.
Comes with features to prevent attacks and mitigate OWASP API security threats.
Must have effective reporting features that help pull out reports to gain insights on API usage.
Must provide features for protecting the data while in-flight.
Provides a great developer experience through the whole API lifecycle.
Provides capabilities for enabling APIs as products that can be monetized.
Provides support for deployment options suitable for the environment and architecture.
Must support identity management features for strong and adaptive authentication, privacy management, cross-protocol, SSO, and more.
Must have features that enable the management of API keys, and the setting of restrictions to the APIs based on the keys.
Must help create a blueprint for the API.
Must have a built-in CI/CD pipeline to support faster deployments and API versioning.
Here are some of the more popular API Management products.
Apigee, part of Google Cloud, assists organizations in designing, securing, and scaling APIs. It offers feature-rich API Management with NGINX and Envoy-based gateways, industry-specific accelerators, and straightforward pricing.
WSO2 API Manager is a complete platform for building, integrating, and exposing managed APIs in cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures. It offers industry-specific solutions and Microsoft Azure-based API Manager Analytics.
A cloud-native API management platform built on Kong Gateway with integrated service mesh and Kubernetes support.
SAP API Management, part of the SAP Integration Suite within the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), leverages an OEM version of Apigee Edge API Gateway. It offers comprehensive API templates and policies through the API Business Hub.
Mulesoft's Anypoint API Manager provides versatile API deployment within the Anypoint Exchange platform. It supports flex gateway, datagraph, and offers effective API governance and community management.
Lightweight open-source API platform supporting both REST and event-driven APIs.
Boomi's API Management offering is a part of the Boomi Atmosphere Platform. Boomi API Management enables API publishers to expose versioned APIs for a logical group of APIs. Boomi's API Management offering is well known for its ease of use and setup.
Open-source, pluggable API gateway with native support for REST, GraphQL, and gRPC.
3Scale API Management Platform, powered by Red Hat, enables API management and monetization. It offers a simple user interface, suitable API gateway, and is ideal for scenarios involving external APIs.
Axway's Amplify API Management supports various deployment models and integrates with other API Gateways like Amazon API Gateway and Azure API Gateway. It offers API strategy support from its "catalyst" strategy team.
Azure API Management, part of Azure Integration Services, enables hybrid deployment using Kubernetes or Azure Arc. Its intuitive admin interface simplifies API management and supports seamless integration with existing monitoring solutions.
IBM API Connect allows developers to create, run, manage, and secure APIs in IBM Cloud. It emphasizes strong security standards and is part of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration based on Red Hat OpenShift.
TIBCO Cloud API Management, formerly Cloud Mashery, combines API mocking, modeling, a developer portal, control center, analytics, and microgateway. It ensures operational benefits and multiple deployment options.
Fully managed API gateway service for building and securing APIs at scale.
webMethods API Management Platform securely exposes APIs to developers, partners, and consumers, combining an API portal, gateway, catalog, and consumption management tools for streamlined application development.
Enterprise-focused API platform with lifecycle management, security, and governance features.
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