What can API management do?

Testing APIs goes hand in hand with creating and developing them because validation is an essential process that ensures an API is behaving the way it should and is ready to be made available to consumers. However, traditional testing can become a bottleneck because writing and maintaining test cases is time consuming.

API management can simplify that with AI that helps developers validate their APIs without the need to write test cases. When API testing is simplified, it can function much like a streamlined CI/CD pipeline. API management can accomplish this, treating API development as if it were software development, including automated testing that works to debug as part of the creation process, making sure that APIs are behaving the way they are meant to without errors.

Many businesses that create APIs will turn them into products available to consumers, offering them as software solutions that can solve business problems. API management allows those businesses to package, publish, promote and reuse these API products across multiple environments with version control and full governance.

When the products are published, they can be associated with a description and plan for consumption, such as how many API calls a consumer can make, allowing for monetization through the management of those policies. The products can also be published to different catalogs that can run on different gateways and in turn run on different clouds.

In terms of publishing APIs, making them available for consumers to access, API management controls who is allowed to publish, what they are allowed to publish and where they are allowed to publish, all while managing any changes so that version control is maintained. These definitions can then be synced up with a code repository and tied into a CI/CD pipeline to automate deployment across different environments. API management is the service that stores these definitions.

Security is a cornerstone of API management. Every API that is made available increases the number of entry points where a potential bad actor has access to get into protected data. API management uses a gateway to manage this security footprint, with the capability to constantly change and update as security standards do the same.

API management makes it easy to control who gets access to data as well as limiting and controlling just what pieces of data are made available, either internally or externally. It helps ensure that API consumers have the right credentials for access, and it does so behind the scenes so that those consumers have a seamless login experience.

To socialize APIs is to make them available to the ecosystems of developers and consumers who access and use them. API management accomplishes this by creating a developer portal that lets users find, sort and organize available APIs. It’s akin to an app store in that way, providing an organizational schema that turns a sea of applications—or, in this case, APIs—into a searchable, and thus usable, catalog.

API management helps build the ecosystem of API developers by giving API creators the ability to customize and enrich their content with tools such as blogs, forums and rating systems that enable information exchange. These tools help customers discover and learn how to consume the APIs that are provided.

This socialization can occur both internally, encouraging reuse of API resources, and externally, making them available for outside developers of applications, but either way, it does so through the aforementioned searchable self-service developer portal.

Monetization of APIs takes two forms: direct and indirect.

Direct billing is simply charging consumers for any API call that they make, either on an individual or subscription basis. With proper API management, an organization can count how many calls a consumer makes and then charge them directly, possibly by using a payment processor so that customers can easily subscribe to a plan with their credit card.

Indirect billing is obtaining revenue through the API exposure itself. An organization can bring in more revenue by reaching more consumers and users and availing a new way of using or selling its products or services. This is how the vast majority of organizations monetize their APIs—using them to expand their customer base and create new ways to reach those customers, thus bringing in business for the organization.

In today’s data-driven business environment, one of the key differentiators that gives organizations a competitive advantage is the ability to fully analyze and act on their data. This is as true of APIs as it is of any other IT tool or resource. As a result, API management solutions provide in-depth analytics, enabling organizations to get the most out of their APIs.

An API management system will collect all the metadata associated with APIs, all the way down to payload data and request and response payloads. This is because the common gateway provided by an API management solution gives it the ability to tap into all the data in a consistent form. So, a user can view the health of the overall system, ask specific questions of the data and optimize how APIs are being used.

These analytical capabilities provide insight into two aspects of API: the technical side of how they are running and the business side of identifying the customers using them and how much revenue they are generating. That data can then be used to build business reports or to be forwarded to an enterprise wide analytics or big data solution to cross-check with other sources and allow for insights and full reporting on API consumption.

It’s vital for organizations to know what’s going on with their API implementation, both technically and in terms of their business, and these analytical tools allow them to see if their endeavors are successful or not.

To “operationalize” APIs means to streamline the process of getting API assets from creation through testing environments and into production, and ultimately make them available for consumers to use. The traceability and telemetry provided by API management provide a bigger view of application performance to accomplish this streamlining.

Operationalizing APIs thus allows for better infrastructure management by letting the APIs participate in an organization’s IT environment in an automated way that is easily performed and implemented as well as tied to different processes that might affect them. The APIs become part of the workflow and the operations environment, aiding in management of the IT infrastructure itself.