API Management: A Powerful Tool for Creating Business Value

In recent years, the evolution of cloud computing and edge computing paradigms have led to a highly diversified continuum of technologies. The latter include for example various edge/cloud delivery models such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Function as a Service (FaaS). Likewise, it is common for enterprises to leverage hybrid computing infrastructures, including both public and private cloud deployments. Furthermore, many enterprises are turning to multi-cloud infrastructures, to combine best-of-breed cloud offerings from different providers. In this landscape, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and development leads are starving for effective application integration and application deployment approaches. To this end, they can nowadays take advantage of API (Application Programming Interface) management processes.

API management provides the means for creating and publishing APIs, while at the same time applying monitoring and control functions over them. Specifically, API management infrastructures enable the definition and enforcement of usage policies on the APIs, along with the application of access control policies. Likewise, they provide the means for monitoring and auditing the usage of APIs, including the extraction of statistics about their use. The merit of API management infrastructures lies in their ability to centralize control over API integration. This allows CIOs to meet ambitious performance and security objectives by implementing and deploying applications that leverage these APIs.

Components of an API Management Infrastructure

A typical API management infrastructure comprises the following components:

• Gateway: API gateways act as intermediaries between the various connected systems and services that leverage APIs. They are indispensable components of the API management infrastructure. In practice, API gateways undertake the routing of API invocations from clients to the proper service providers, including any required protocol translations. Moreover, they support security standards like Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption and OAuth (Open Authorization) to ensure that the interactions between clients and service providers are trustworthy. API gateways facilitate application development through enabling developers to access and use microservices based on managed APIs.
• Developers’ Portal: Such portals provide a single-entry point for developers to access information and documentation about the available APIs. Furthermore, they facilitate the testing of APIs, while offering access to application build functions. Likewise, developers can leverage the portal to browse API packages and hierarchies in a structured and intuitive way.
• Reporting and Statistics: API Management infrastructures provide developers, deployers, integrators and other stakeholders with statistics and usage reports for the various API functions. They enable auditing of individual API functions in terms of their response times, latency, availability, and overall performance. Such auditing functions facilitate the diagnosis of faults and usage abnormalities, while at the same time boosting the development of effective troubleshooting strategies. By leveraging facts and figures about API usage, enterprises can take educated decisions about how to evolve and fine-tune their APIs.
• Lifecycle Management: Lifecycle management functions play an important role in organizations’ efforts to manage their APIs in a scalable way. Specifically, application development and deployment stakeholders can access detailed information throughout an application’s lifecycle. In this direction, gateways offer version control functions, along with a pool of functionalities for creating, updating, managing, activating, deactivating, and deleting API functions.

API Management Benefits

API Management infrastructures deliver the following benefits to enterprises:

• Accelerating the development and deployment of Business Functions: Leveraging APIs, industrial organizations can accelerate the development and deployment of complex functions. APIs provide loose coupling between front-end and back-end developments. For instance, any updates to the back end are reflected in the APIs without affecting the front end, and vice versa. APIs updates are automatically documented to facilitate their use in applications. This is how several companies can nowadays implement, deploy and roll out complex services in few weeks’ time.
• Superior security features: API management infrastructures enable enterprises to place all their services within a single administrative domain, which allows them to set and enforce security rules. The latter can range from simple filtering and encryption to more sophisticated checks that boost regulatory compliance (e.g., General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance for organizations in Europe).
• Performance Management: The centralization of APIs enables organizations to implement application performance measures in a structured and integrated way. For instance, it is possible to enforce policies on data quotas and rate limits during the invocation of APIs. Likewise, it is possible to implement policies like caching and memory management according to the usage of APIs. Based on an API management infrastructure organizations can access all the different APIs through a façade and subject to a set of properly configured performance management policies.
• Fast Transformation and Effective Deployment of Legacy Services: With an API management infrastructure at hand organizations are provided with easy and flexible ways to convert legacy services into state-of-the-art web-based infrastructures (e.g., REST APIs). Most importantly, an API management infrastructure provides an easy, centralized, and proven way for deploying, testing, and monitoring all their different APIs using a single set of tools.
• Management of heterogeneity: API management enables enterprises to alleviate the complexity of heterogeneous deployments, such as hybrid cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures. API gateways provide a single entry point and a single set of tools for streamlining APIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Likewise, they facilitate developers to combine and orchestrate these APIs in the scope of their application development tasks.

CIOs are gradually acknowledging the benefits of API management, which is the reason why there is a significant number of different API management tools in the market. In several cases, these tools are deployed and used in conjunction with mainstream public cloud infrastructures. The latter provides the means for deploying API gateways and provide a host of tools for testing, managing, and optimizing APIs. In this context, CIOs must consider the technical and business benefits of API management, including how it can help them meet stringent performance, security, and compliance requirements. They must also shape strategies for deploying and adopting API Gateways, and for migrating their services to them. API management will be an integral element of modern enterprise cloud environments, especially for enterprises that leverage hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. It is therefore a good idea for modern CIOs to prepare for adopting them and for optimizing their use.