An effective API management platform provides users with far more capabilities than merely managing APIs. It allows developers to build new features, engage with communities, create dynamic ecosystems and design new experiences to delight customers—all while effectively controlling API security.
Designing and creating APIs
An API platform allows you to instantly create APIs from existing services with a single API management tool.
Managing the full lifecycle of APIs
Take control of every stage—from designing, developing, testing, releasing and monitoring APIs.
Operating with a common managed catalog of services
Empower operations under a defined, unified layer of common framework and standards.
Security and policy enforcement
Utilize policy enforcement throughout the API lifecycle for security, transformation, validation, error processing and monitoring.
Creating API products
Consolidate API resources to enable your developers.
Monetizing your APIs
Monetize you’re APIs with transparency—monitor who's using your APIs and microservices and measure what's being consumed to impact revenue.
Securely exposing APIs
Securely provide access to your enterprise data and services to the outside world.
Analyzing APIs
Use analytics and reporting to detect threats, track API usage, monitor interactions and more.
Managing related microservices in a service mesh
Deploy microservices and manage them with agility—without the risk of chaos that can accompany service mesh architectures.
Service creation
Create and deploy API services on a platform that is secure and scalable.
Prebuilt application connectors for services
With prebuilt connectors, you can count on the broadest connectivity capabilities—without coding.
Event-driven APIs
Enable agility and scalability with real-time interactions.
Creating, building and supporting a developer ecosystem
Use a developer portal to create a storefront for your APIs, grow your developer ecosystem and build a community around your APIs.
Custom approval workflows
Customize workflows, for example, to approve what users and groups of users have access to.
Version control
Quickly evolve your APIs to improve functionality without the complexity.
Overall API landscape view
A single, overall API landscape view is necessary in order to effectively control and manage all your APIs, API gateways, data sources and more.
How does an API management platform fit into microservices architectures?
Microservices architecture began trending in recent years as a modern way to redesign legacy monolithic applications. This new style gave developers independence, agility, and the flexibility to work on pieces of their applications in isolation. Service meshes were also created to manage the interactions between microservices and their security. This is quite similar to what APIs and gateways do for applications, and that’s why the natural progression was to integrate service meshes with API management.
A modern API management platform will allow its users to manage their microservices the same way that they manage their APIs: providing context-based routing, traffic throttling, data transformation and more for microservices, and even enabling the microservices to be used as APIs.
