Planning your cloud

When you install IBM® API Connect, you must define an on-premises cloud. To determine the topology of appliances for this cloud consider the number of Management and Gateway servers that are required to address your API usage.

Ensure that you have the minimum hardware and software requirements installed. For more information, see IBM API Connect Version 5.0 requirements.

Note: If you are creating a cluster environment with multiple servers, you must have an NTP server. For more information on configuring an NTP server, see Configuring an NTP server.

At least one Management server and one Gateway server are required to create a cloud capable of running the API Connect solution. For a description about the specific type of servers, see Firewall requirements.

The API Connect cloud can include a mixture of different physical and virtual appliances. You can also choose to define an environment made up of only virtual appliances. The following table identifies the supported form-factors for each server.

Table 1. Supported form factors for IBM API Connect servers
	Management server	Gateway server
Virtual Appliance	Supported	Supported
Physical Appliance	Not applicable	Supported

The minimum server configuration of one Management server and one Gateway server can support a basic test environment. However, if you are planning a production environment, then you might want to build in some resilience to avoid a single point of failure. Regardless of what you initially define, you can add extra servers to your cloud in the future.

To help with your topology planning, consider the questions in the following table to determine your API Connect infrastructure.

Type of server?	Number of servers? What is your expected API usage?	Physical instance?	Virtual instance?
Management	Minimum of 1	Not applicable	A Management server is always virtual
Gateway	Minimum of 1	Do you have an IBM WebSphere® DataPower® Integration Appliance that you can use?	You can use a virtual appliance. Note: If you use a mixture of physical and virtual appliances for the Gateway servers, the load balancing configuration might not use the full capabilities of the physical appliance.

For detailed guidance on deploying IBM API Connect in various environments and topologies, see the API Connect whitepaper.