Who does what in API Connect?

Systems administrators

If you deploy API Connect on premises, then your company manages the systems. Because API Connect comprises multiple servers even in an on-premises deployment, the collection of servers and services is referred to as a (local) cloud. This is unrelated to any servers and systems that are deployed in IBM® Cloud.

In an on-premises deployment, there are two roles for managing your deployment:

• Cloud owner: There is one cloud owner for a deployment, and that person adds other people to the server management team.
• Cloud administrator: Your deployment needs at least one cloud administrator; your company will probably assign multiple people to perform this role. Cloud administrators manage the deployment and configuration of API Connect servers and software.

In the API Connect documentation, cloud owners and administrators are primarily interested in the following sections, which introduce concepts and explain how to deploy, maintain, and configure the components of an on-premises deployment.

Users

At the highest level, API Connect users belong to organizations, which are groups of people. A provider organization (often shortened as p-org) is a group of people who create, publish, and maintain APIs that are then used by people in a consumer organization. Consumers develop their own applications that call the APIs created by providers. A single customer can create multiple provider organizations and consumer organizations. For example, different divisions within a large company might work with different technologies and create entirely different sets of APIs, so it makes sense to group them into different p-orgs. Each provider organization publishes their APIs to a Developer Portal that uses consumer organizations to manage the customers who use those APIs.

At a minimum, you need one provider organization if you want to publish and manage APIs with API Connect, and one consumer organization for each customer.

Provider organization

A provider organization performs many tasks during the lifecycle of an API, from developing, publishing, and maintaining APIs to managing the membership of the organization itself. Each p-org can be as large or as small as needed. A large company might create a p-org for each product team, or for each department but a small company might use a single p-org.

A person can be a member of multiple provider organizations and receive a different set of permissions for each. When the user logs in to API Connect, they select the organization whose resources they will use, and receive the appropriate permissions for that organization for the duration of the session.

The following roles are commonly associated with a provider organization but are not necessarily represented by different people. In a small company, one person might perform all of the API maintenance tasks while in a larger company, several people might take on separate roles.

• Organization Owner: Every provider organization requires one owner to ensure that a user account is associated with the organization. The organization owner has full access to all of the p-org’s resources (APIs, Products, Catalogs, and so on) and role cannot be deleted. The organization owner can add people to the organization manager role.
• Organization Manager: Maintaining the organization account is the job of the organization manager. In a large company, several people might share this role. Organization managers add members to provider organizations and assign them the permissions needed to perform their jobs. Organization owners and managers typically use the docs on administering provider orgs and administering members and roles.
• API Developer: In API Connect, an API developer creates new APIs and updates existing APIs as needed. The API developer can configure policies that define security restrictions, logging rules, and quotas that control access to your company’s resources. The API developer might be assigned to work with a specific Catalog that manages a subset of APIs, or they might receive access to all of the p-org’s Catalogs and the Spaces within each. API developers are usually most concerned with documentation related to developing APIs, managing API settings, and authoring policies for APIs.
• API Administrator: After an API developer creates a set of APIs, the API administrator manages the distribution. The API administrator defines Plans that determine access to the APIs, collects related APIs into Products, and publishes them to the consumer Developer Portals. To complete these tasks, the API administrator uses documentation focused on managing API syndication and working with Products.
• Product Manager: A product manager controls access to the Developer Portal where customers subscribe to APIs and then tracks API usage and performance. For each customer, the product manager creates a consumer organization, assigns a customer representative as the owner, and manages the relationship between the provider organization and each consumer organization. The product manager can customize the appearance of Developer Portal for their p-org as well as provide forums and blogs for their consumers. The product manager uses the API Connect Analytics service to track API usage and performance so that the p-org knows when APIs should be updated or retired. The product manager typically uses documentation on administering consumer organizations, using the Developer Portal, and reviewing API analytics.

Consumer organization

A consumer organization creates applications that use the APIs that are developed by provider organizations. Each provider’s APIs are made available to each consumer organization in the API Connect Developer Portal. Members of a consumer organization typically perform two functions:

• Consumer Organization Owner: The consumer organization owner also manages the organization by inviting other members and assigning permissions to each. This role additionally has permissions to customize the Developer Portal where members access APIs that the organization is subscribed to.
• Application Developer: Create applications that invoke APIs shared through the Developer Portal.

The only API Connect feature that API consumers use is the Developer Portal, which is managed by the API provider. There is no need for consumers to read the API Connect documentation.