Defining your Cloud Manager topology

To define your API Connect on-premises cloud, you define availability zones and register services within those zones to securely create, promote, and track APIs. The installation procedure provides initial configuration of an Availability Zone containing the Management service.

About this task

The Cloud Manager topology consists of Availability Zones that contain the API Connect services (management, gateway, analytics and portal services). Availability Zones can contain one or more gateway services, analytics service, and portal service, but there is one management service that spans all Availability Zones. When configuring your Availability Zones and Services, the recommended practice is that the gateway, analytics, and portal services do not communicate across Availability Zones. Only the management service can span across Availability Zones.

The following diagram illustrates the topology for services and Availability Zones in an API Connect network:

Services and Availability Zones

One of the following roles is required to register and manage services:

  • Administrator
  • Topology Administrator
  • Owner
  • A custom role with the Topology:Manage permission
Following are the tasks involved in defining the API Connect topology:
  • Create one or more Availability Zones.
  • Register one or more Gateway, Analytics, and Portal services in each Availability Zone
  • Associate an Analytics service with each Gateway service
  • Set the visibility for the services
There are two types of deployment scenarios:
  1. Appliance-based deployment using .ova files on Virtual Machines
  2. Container-based deployment using Docker and Kubernetes clusters
The configuration of the Management service will differ depending upon the deployment scenario. For both, a Management service is added to the Default Availability Zone by the installation utility.

Once the cloud is defined and an email server has been configured, you invite other users to access API Manager to create APIs. You expose these APIs to the development community through the Developer Portal user interface.

To define the API Connect cloud, complete the following tasks: