IBM API Connect
API Connect enables users to expose APIs, through a developer portal, targeting application developers both inside & outside their organization.
IBM API Connect is an end-to-end solution that allows users to create, secure, manage, socialize, monetize and analyze APIs. It provides a powerful set of capabilities from turning backend RESTFUL or SOAP services into managed services. This is done by publishing APIs to API Gateways, while enforcing lifecycle and governance controls on those APIs. API Connect enables users to expose APIs, through a developer portal, targeting application developers both inside and outside their organization. Additionally, the solution’s analytics tooling helps API providers and API consumers better understand the health and consumption of deployed APIs.
The major components of API Connect, as well as considerations for configuring different clouds and environments within API Connect so that users can be successful in their API strategies. It targets Solution and Integration Architects.
There are four different Components in API Connect 2018.4.1.x:
Enable Trusted Transactions
The Management Service provides two functional roles. The API Manager and the Cloud Manager.
- The Cloud Manager controls the infrastructure of the API Cloud. This is typically only accessed by Infrastructure or Operation teams.
- The API Manager controls the creation, publication and management of APIs.
- It hosts the Cloud Manager user interface, targeting Will the Cloud Manager and his team
- It hosts the API Manager user interface, which is leveraged by Steve, Jason and Shavon
- Enables API provider lines of business to build and publish APIs
- It contains a persistent database that is used to store the configuration data about the system
- It contains a rich set of RESTFul and CLI commands to automate API Management tasks for your organization
- It maintains and manages the connection to the user registries that validate both providers and consumers of APIs
Gateway Service
The API Gateway Serviceis the runtime component. It is responsible for responding to incoming API requests from client applications:
- Validating that the application that is making the API call is permitted to access the API (i.e. has an active subscription to a product that contains the API operation)
- Enforcing the security constraints defined by the API such as a requirement to authenticate using a protocol like Basic Authentication or OAuth 2.0
- Enforcing rate limits so that the calling application cannot invoke the API more frequently than the API provider has specified.
- Invoking the outbound request to the backend service or services that are defined in the API implementation, which may involve protocol transformation such as a RESTFul API calling out to a backend SOAP service
- Aggregating responses from potentially multiple backend service calls and returning the relevant content of those requests to the original caller
Analytics Service
The Analytics Service is deployed separately from the API Manager. The Analytics Service is built on top of Elastic Stack and provides the following:
- Storing the API event logs as they are processed from the Gateway Service
- Processing API event logs from the gateway.
- Visualizing the aggregated metric data from the API events, so that API providers can better understand their APIs’ health and consumption
- Surfacing the API calls raw log data to help developers debug
- Off-loading the API event records to target locations (e.g. Splunk, Syslog, Kafka, HTTP, etc)
Developer Portal Service
The Developer Portal Service is the component through which APIs are socialized to application developers. The following functionality is provided:
- Discovering the set of APIs and Products that are made available by an API provider
- Registering of applications to API consumer organizations
- Creation of an application’s credentials is required to authenticate and identify the application when making API calls
- Host content, communities and forums on the Portal
IBM API Connect - Key highlights
Deployed API calls
- The ability to invoke APIs that have already been deployed to the platform
Developer Portal viewing
- Ability for application developers to view the documentation for existing APIs
Analytics collection
- Ability to collect new analytics event data about incoming API calls
API Manager
- Ability to manage existing APIs or deploy new ones through the user interface or command-line toolkit
Analytics query
- Ability to retrieve/view historical data about API events
Developer Portal updating
- Ability for new application developers to register, or for app developers to subscribe to products
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