Asset Promotion

webMethods API Gateway supports staging and promotion of assets. In a typical enterprise-level, solutions are separated according to the different stages of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) such as development, quality assurance (QA), and production stages. As each organization builds APIs for easy consumption and monetization, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) is an integral part of the solution. CI is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day and CD is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. Development of assets starts at the development stage and once the assets are developed, they are promoted to the QA stage for testing, after testing of the assets is complete, the assets are promoted to the deployment stage.

webMethods API Gateway provides tools and features to automate your CI and CD practices. Modifications made to the APIs, policies, and other assets can be efficiently delivered to the application developers with speed and agility. For example, When you publish new applications, the API definitions change. These changes are to be propagated to application developers. The API provider has to update the associated documentation for the API or application. In most cases this process is a tedious manual exercise. You can use webMethods API Gateway staging and promotion to address such cases to automate API and policy management that makes deployment faster, introduces continuous innovation with speed and agility. This ensures that new updates and capabilities are automatically, efficiently, and securely delivered to their developers and partners, in a timely fashion and without manual intervention.

webMethods API Gateway provides the staging and promotion feature to automate the CI and CD practices. Modifications made to the APIs, policies, and other assets can be efficiently delivered to the application developers with speed and agility.

Staging and promotion allows you to:

• Promote all the run time assets such as webMethods API Gateway APIs, aliases, applications, policies, or admin configurations across different stages.
• Select and promote a subset of assets from one stage to another stage. For example, you can promote a single API and its dependencies from one stage to another.
• Select dependencies involved while promoting an asset. For example, while selecting a service for promotion, you must also select the dependent policies, applications, and so on.
• Modify values of attributes of selected aliases during promotion.
• Roll back assets in case of failures.

When you have three stages namely Dev, QA, and Prod, you can promote assets in the given sequence. That is, you can promote assets from stage 1 to stage 2, and from there to stage 3.

To promote assets from first stage, you create aliases of those assets that you want to promote to the second stage and promote them. Similarly, from the second stage you create aliases of assets that you want to promote to the third stage and promote them. The following illustration shows the flow: