API management with IBM API Connect SaaS on AWS cloud

An increasing number of companies are undergoing a digital transformation and seeking to adopt new technologies as they pursue top-line growth, organizational efficiency, and more innovative ways of delivering faster, more personalized customer experiences. However, to achieve these goals, companies are discovering that a robust API strategy is a prerequisite.

Organizations rely on hundreds, sometimes thousands of APIs, and this number of APIs is growing rapidly. APIs provide the foundation for modernization and help organizations build successful business ecosystems. APIs link together individual systems that contain data about clients, partners, products, business performance, and more. They help organizations scale operations by providing a convenient and standardized means of sharing data and services.

API management should not be viewed as just another piece of technology, but rather as the basis of an organization’s digital strategy, where you can expose enterprise business assets to new digital ecosystems.

As businesses continue to grow, keeping track of all the APIs available for use, socialization, and monetization can become more challenging. This explosion of APIs might increase the likelihood of security issues, since unknown APIs are possibly unsecure, out of date, and provide a potential breach point. A robust API management solution is designed to allow organizations to monitor API lifecycles, boost socialization and optimize monetization efforts across the entire business ecosystem, while driving digitization at scale.

This article discusses the challenges that businesses often face as they go through cycles of transformation, requiring the enterprise to implement a secure API strategy with consistency and control across their entire business. With these changes, developers must ensure accessibility to applications and efficiency of API lifecycle management. IBM API Connect as a Service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a comprehensive platform that will enable businesses to manage their APIs from beginning to end while being closer than ever to their applications and data on AWS.

IBM API Connect puts API management to work

IBM API Connect provides comprehensive, intuitive, and scalable API management that helps enable organizations to create, manage, protect, socialize, and monetize APIs across multiple clouds and on-premises.

IBM API Connect allows businesses to create new APIs with a robust set of tools, which can help to bring APIs to market more rapidly while providing a common experience for managing the end-to-end lifecycles of their APIs. Developers can deliver applications efficiently with self-service APIs. Adoption of APIs is promoted by company-branded portals and community building features, while a deeper view of usage data helps inform API monetization. The result is that organizations can now power digital apps and spur innovation in real-time.

IBM API Connect is:

• Intuitive, allowing users to create, manage, protect, and socialize APIs.
• Robust, with a feature-rich set of API management capabilities to enable rapid implementation of API strategy with consistency and full control.
• Highly secured, with an enterprise-grade encrypted gateway and robust set of API security policies.
• Flexible, allowing developers to work where the data and applications reside.

IBM API Connect as a Service on AWS Cloud

To increase accessibility to applications hosted on AWS Cloud using APIs, companies can now use IBM API Connect as a Service on AWS Cloud. Companies can unlock the potential of their data and services by publishing new, highly capable, and secure APIs quickly and easily to internal developers and external partners. IBM API Connect as a Service provides a high performing and scalable API security gateway that protects access to your back-end systems.

IBM API Connect on AWS provides full lifecycle management of APIs. The enterprise can support the interaction between clients and back-end services using IBM API Connect on AWS as well as rapidly design, model, develop, test, and deploy APIs in an automated continuous delivery model using the tools provided by API Connect.

API Connect Developer portal is a customizable, self-service developer portal for publicizing APIs. Publicizing and socializing the APIs through a user-friendly portal is crucial in promoting the value of your business and the market reach of your brand.

The AWS Cloud platform provides required agility and power with load balancers, authorization mechanisms, a certificate manager, and more, apart from hosting the backend services.

Reference architecture for IBM API Connect as a Service on AWS

Let’s review the detailed reference architecture diagram that gives a visual representation of the solution.

The flow steps in this architecture are:

• An API developer signs on to IBM API Connect. The API developer creates the necessary APIs and integrates them with the back-end APIs. The developer tests and deploys the APIs to the runtime and publishes them to API management. They add API endpoints to API products, specify access control, and publish the APIs to the API Connect Developer portal for external discovery by application developers.
• An application developer accesses the API Connect Developer portal, uses search, and discovers APIs.
• Client applications (consuming applications) such as web apps, mobile apps, integration apps can invoke the APIs to take advantage of backend services.
• API requests are handled by the DataPower API gateway in IBM API Connect, which performs security validation and load balancing for all API requests. IBM API Connect validates access policies with API management and invokes the API.
• IBM API Connect integrates directly with AWS Lambda, which can be linked to other backend services running on customer’s VPC.
• API calls can be authorized using different authentication mechanisms such as OAuth providers or a user registry.
• Information between clients and API Connect and between API Connect and backend APIs can be secured using the mutual TLS authentication mechanism. This helps mitigate security threats, including man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Certificates can be created using OpenSSL and imported into the AWS certificate manager to use the same certificate with API Connect.
• API developers and API owners can log on to the API analytics visualization component to view dashboards on API usage metrics and other analytics. The analytics data can be offloaded to Amazon S3, which integrates with Amazon QuickSight, or Splunk.
• To enable API consumers to subscribe to products with paid plans, the Stripe payment method can be configured.

Summary

Companies who need API management features that IBM API Connect provides and the power and agility of AWS cloud can explore and realize the benefits of using IBM API Connect as a Service on AWS cloud.

Companies will realize these benefits and more by using IBM API Connect on AWS:

• Full-lifecycle management of APIs
• API testing including generation of test cases to improve quality of APIs & productivity of API developers
• API management services on the same cloud as their applications & data
• Monetization of the hidden value of their business data with a high degree of flexibility and scalability
• Socialization and self-service of their APIs with full-featured, company branded Developer Portals

You can try the offering on AWS Cloud with a 1-month free trial account, here, to get started and evaluate IBM API Connect as a Service on AWS. For paid plans, refer to this link for more details.

To learn more about IBM API Connect and its capabilities, try the tutorials on IBM Developer. And check out the IBM Developer Amazon Web Services (AWS) hub to learn more about IBM and AWS.