In the digital-driven era, applications have more importance in the daily lives of human beings. Most organizations need applications that can integrate and communicate with other applications and devices.
Application Programming Interface plays a crucial role in the holistic integration approach. This is what makes it special in the business sphere. APIs are significant to the functions of our applications, data, programs, and customer interactions. API acts as a middle-man between two or more systems or applications.
API management is the process of developing, publishing, and handling APIs in a scalable and secure environment.
The API management platform helps to access, control, distribute, and analyze APIs utilized by developers in an organization setting. API management platforms benefit enterprises by centralizing total control over their API integrations.
API Management Platform Components
- API gateways
- Developer portal
- API lifecycle management
- Analytics engine
API gateways
API gateway is a significant component of an API management platform. It manages all routing requests, protocol translation, and composition between the clients and other third-party services they’re engaged to.
Developer Portal
The developer portal is one of the components of an API management platform. It has many uses, but the top feature is to provide a self-service hub for developers to share and access API documentation. The developer portal also helps to streamline communication between teams.
API lifecycle management
API lifecycle management shows off a smart view of how to manage the various stages of an API, from development to retirement. This capability provides an extraordinary system for developing, testing, onboarding, and handling APIs. Let’s list out the stages of API lifecycle management.
- Manage and monitor the usage of APIs
- Develop
- Secure
- Document
- Test
- Version
- Publish
- Promote
- Monetize
- Retirement
Analytics Engine
An analytics engine gives insights to business directors, operational administrators, and developers. This part of the API management platform has the functionality to research or analyze past data, detect patterns of usage, and develop synthetic transactions to test API performance and behaviour. One of the vital aspects of API management platforms is that they allow enterprises to track usage metrics in a variety of ways.
API Management Platform – Roles and Functions
API management platform delivers exceptional functionalities and benefits to organizations.
- It controls and automates connections between APIs and the applications
- It ensures consistency between API implementations and versions
- It monitors traffic from all apps
- It protects API from unwanted misuse
- It configures endpoints, fault tolerance and load balancing
Wrapping up
By using open-source API management platforms, organizations can cut down the time, effort, and cost invested in maintaining the tool as well as its API. If you’re ready to land your foot on digital transformation, you need to choose the best platform for API management that will take care of your business needs.