API Centric Design - API Management

API Management platforms helps in addressing the common functional needs of APIs such as Security, Documentation, Sandboxing, Developer Portal, Monitoring, Auditing, Logging, Usage Metrics, Monetization, Subscription models, etc. These platforms provides high level abstraction to these low level essential needs of API thereby eliminating the complexities involved while building APIs ground up.

Below is a sample illustration of an API Management that provides an abstraction layer between the consumers and published actual API endpoints (bound to backend services).

Some of the key vendors of API Management/Gateway are Tibco Mashery, Google Apigee, WSO2, Amazon API Gateway, Kong, and Mulesoft. Most of these vendors have both On Premise and Cloud based solutions. Kong an open-source based platform provides flexibility and customization capability enabling developers to build layer on top of the platform.

Key features of an API Management Platform are: