API Management
APIs have become a requirement for building digital businesses. As enterprises are moving more towards digital businesses and build more and more APIs, API management has become increasingly important. Y&L has seen a significant rise in the number of APIs businesses depend on and the development complexities they introduce.
APIs require strong documentation, increased levels of security, comprehensive testing, routine versioning and high reliability. Often, these requirements go beyond the abilities of software-based IT development teams, and therefore, the use of API management software has become popular.
What Is An API Management Platform?
- An API management platform is a prefabricated collection of tools that comes packaged within a standardized API creation, deployment and management environment.
- It acts as a proxy for API requests and protects the back-ends of services from being brought down from too many queries or breaches.
- It generally includes analytics and usage reporting, API key and authorization management, live updated documentation and developer community management. The platform may also include a developer portal that provides a simplified way for developers to both acquire and distribute APIs needed to build certain applications.
Benefits of an API Management Platform
API Governance
- Standardized toolsets for API definitions, creation and testing lifecycle
- Developer portal for onboarding developers and applications
- Provides an enterprise capability for exposing reusable APIs, to be consumed by external and internal consumers across the organization
- Ensures the integrity of APIs which means they are more likely to be used by developers/consumers
API Security
- Possible to implement standard security pattern across the organization, thereby reducing overhead of maintaining multiple security models across the organization
- Out of box, Apigee provides policies for OAuth 2.0 (all the grant types), traffic management and payload protection
- Possible to implement custom policies inline with organization’s enterprise security model
ROI
- Helps mitigate long-term effects of legacy code by providing a centralized repository of information and reducing team member onboarding
- Tools free up teams to focus more on the core functionality of an API, and allow non technical staff to pitch in with management and support
- Provides an ability for the organization to monetize API usage
Analytics
- Apigee dashboard provides patterns for API traffic, developer engagement and developer apps
- Allows organization to promote or retire APIs based on API usage pattern
- Additional dashboards for monitoring APIs including Latency analysis, API proxy performance, Cache performance and Error code analysis
