API Management

14 sept. 2022 | 2 min lecture

API Management is a set of processes for designing, publishing, documenting and analyzing APIs within a secure environment.

This process makes it possible to make the best use of the APIs without jeopardizing the information system and without affecting the user experience. It is a management solution that allows companies to ensure that the public/internal or private APIs they design are usable and secure.

API Management covers a wide spectrum of uses because it operates at several levels:

Technical (security, high availability, data validation, …)
Architecture (gateway proxy)
Data governance
Organizational

It comes with new concepts with which the business and technical teams must become familiar. This goes through a learning phase in which the organization must also integrate new functions and new modes of governance. These relate to a necessary product API mindset which extends from the marketing of APIs to their distribution and commercialization.

Management tools may include, among other examples:

acculturation
- manifesto: writing a unified API vision between the teams with constraint and business necessities;
- workshop: workshop on APIs with the objective of continuous improvement of the proposed solutions;
- roadmap: the monitoring of the API evolution, with the appearance of new norms and standards and the business evolution obliges to perceive and provide a desired vision.

technical
- API gateway (gateway, reverse proxy): aims to direct API traffic and to link the networks together (client with services, etc.). It is possible to group a collection of management servers and gateway servers together to create clusters to balance the load and isolate traffic;
- publication: is the tool that API providers use to define APIs, their access and usage policies, debugging execution as well as managing their API lifecycle APIs;
- portal (API store): is a community site for API subscribers who are maintained by API providers. It includes documentation, interactive API console for testing APIs, ability to subscribe to APIs and manage subscriptions, and API vendor or community support service;
- reporting: data communication and analysis tool allowing to have a clear visibility on the use of the API. It is also a marketing tool that allows the behavior of subscribers to be measured and thus allows the publisher of the API to optimize its offer;
- monetization: the API access monetization service makes it possible to monetize the APIs hosted by the chosen API provider.

External reference: