APIs are foundational technology platform in Digital Transformation journey which enables companies to think towards Digital Economy. APIs enables internal or external integration of data, services, and processes in application development process. API Management is essential in Digital Economy to determine how to distribute, control, monitor, analyze and monetize. The common platform capabilities include developer portal, API gateway, API lifecycle management and API analytics.
Some of the challenges faced by organizations while developing APIs are:
- API first is the core requirements in digital transformation and if the applications require to be built large number of APIs, it might take long time to develop.
- Business Analysts, Developers and Testers work in silos while implementing APIs and not able to stitch the story as they may be using different tools.
- Developing applications requires multiple ways of connecting such as data, application, services, processes etc.
- Challenges in getting the data out of legacy applications.
- Implementation of Security aspects for the APIs while exposing or accessing the APIs.
- Managing and governing the APIs developed and it becomes even more complicated when you have large number of APIs and different versions are used.
It is a good practice to have API Management platform to address the above challenges and below diagram gives the high-level overview of platform capabilities.
The below mind map gives detailed view of API Platform capabilities required for a digital transformation during development life cycle.
The below mind map gives detailed view of API Platform capabilities required for a digital transformation during deploy and manage life cycle.
The methodology for building the API First Applications as below.
This blog provides the generic perspective about what the API Platforms should have capabilities for developing API Centric Applications. There are many tools in the market which provides these capabilities and one can choose the platform by evaluating them based on their fitment requirements. The below are some of the API Platforms provider available in market. This is not the full list and there are many available in market.
- MuleSoft Anypoint (Salesforce)
- Apigee (Google)
- Amplify API Management (Axway)
- IBM API Connect
- Azure API Management
- Oracle API Platform Cloud Service
- Red Hat 3scale API Management
- TIBCO Cloud Mashery API Management Platform
- Software AG webMethods API Cloud
- WSO2
- DellBoomi
