What we know.

Modern IT infrastructure and solutions consist of a dozen components that communicate through Application Programming Interfaces or APIs. On average, the 15-years old company runs about 70 bespoke and 3rd-party solutions (Consumer-facing, CRM, Financial & Reporting, Procurement, HR management, etc.) integrated into a single ERP system to communicate with each other.

API is the building block of modern microservices-based applications. It is also an integration point of legacy software inherited from previous decades but still vital for business success. Such blocks are using for both internal and public-faced B2B integrations.

The more services company has, the challenging it becomes to develop, integrate, protect, and consume appropriate software solutions.

Nobody likes surprises.

At scaling, the company has to address questions like:

• How are our services connected?
• Who does consume this particular service?
• How many requests to specific API do we have? Can we scale fast enough to serve all of these requests?
• How much is this service cost in terms of ownership? Is it cost-effective? Which APIs are using the most of resources?
• Can we expose our legacy system as API and be sure it is secure?
• What is the best solution to enable well documented, secured, and scalable APIs? What does fit our business best - Google Apigee, Mulesoft Anypoint, Amazon API Gateway, Tibco Mashery, or something else?
• And the main one - Can we run our API like a product to monetize it? Which is the Roadmap?

So, visibility and control are main challenges facing the Businesses having dozens and hundreds of APIs.

From the development perspective, APIs provide engineers with programmatic access between two or more software systems hosted on servers, clouds, desktops, mobile, and web applications. Each technology generation has its dominate, usually standards-based API type: REST, SOAP, JAVA RMI, JDBC, COM, ODBC, CORBA (etc), or even plain files for legacy systems.

Each API implementor has its proprietary layers on top of a standard. For example, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft - all have Graph-style APIs over REST with their one’s unique structure, features, methods, and limitations.

The complexity of integrations increases exponentially over the time and volume of systems, which means a rise in the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The Solution.

There is a better Way – API Management solution like Google Cloud's Apigee, Mulesoft Anypoint, or bespoke one based on opensource Nginx.

The main idea of the API management solution is simple. It is a separate layer between applications and business systems. The same approach we can see in Cloudflare which works like a reverse-proxy between your web-site and web users, securing your Corporate assets and make it accessible.

By exposing APIs externally, companies can break into new markets and reach new customers and partners. Similarly, by exposing APIs internally, they can unlock business-critical data and leverage it throughout the organization. With API Management solution you will also be able to:

• Get insights about API health and usage
• Easily scale on-demand as your API program grows
• Get up and running in minutes. Empower developers by API Portal
• Secure and protect your APIs from abuse and overuse, enable caching and quota policies
• Drive at scale, enable new business opportunities and monetization