Working with Products

In IBM® API Connect, Plans and APIs are grouped together in Products, with which you can manage the availability and visibility of APIs and Plans.

Products provide a method by which you can group APIs into a package that is intended for a particular use. Additionally, they contain Plans, which can be used to differentiate between different offerings. Plans can share APIs, but whether subscription approval is required depends upon the Plan itself. Additionally, you can enforce rate limits through these Plans, or through operations within the APIs of a Plan that override the rate limit of the Plan. You can also assign different subscription costs to your Plans to differentiate the rates of API calls. For more information, see Monetizing your Products.

To make an API available to an application developer, it must be included in a Plan. You can create Plans only within Products, and these Products are then published in a Catalog. A lifecycle manager can then control the availability and visibility of APIs and Plans through the API Manager. By using the API Manager, you can specify the Plans that an application developer is able to subscribe to through the Developer Portal. The application developer can only subscribe to one Plan from a specific Product. Multiple Plans within a single Product are useful in that they can fulfill similar purposes but with differing levels of performance and cost. For example, you can have a Demo Plan, which makes a single API available free of charge, and a Full Plan which makes several APIs available with a monthly subscription cost.

As well as controlling which APIs an application developer can use, different Plans can be used to implement different rate limits. A rate limit can be implemented as a default rate that is shared across an entire Plan, or can be set for specific operations of an API within that Plan, exempting them from the shared Plan rate limit. Different Plans can have differing rate limits, both between operations and for the overall limit. This is useful for providing differing levels of service to customers. For example, a Demo Plan might enforce a rate limit of ten calls per minute, while a Full Plan might permit up to 1000 calls per second.

In addition, you can apply burst limits to your Plans, to prevent usage spikes that might damage infrastructure. Multiple burst limits can be set per Plan, at second and minute time intervals. You can also set multiple rate limits per Plan and per operation, at second, minute, hour, day, and week time intervals.