API management
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API management is the process of creating and publishing web APIs, enforcing their
usage policies, controlling access, nurturing the subscriber community, collecting
and analyzing usage statistics, and reporting on performance. API Management
components provide mechanisms and tools to support developer and subscriber
community.[1]
Contents
1 Components
2 Market size
3 Products
3.1 Opensource
3.2 Proprietary
4 References
Components
While solutions vary, components that provide the following functionality are
typically found in API management products:
Gateway: a server that acts as an API front-end, receives API requests, enforces
throttling and security policies, passes requests to the back-end service and then
passes the response back to the requester.[2] A gateway often includes a
transformation engine to orchestrate and modify the requests and responses on the
fly. A gateway can also provide functionality such as collecting analytics data and
providing caching. The gateway can provide functionality to support authentication,
authorization, security, audit and regulatory compliance.[3]
Publishing tools: a collection of tools that API providers use to define APIs, for
instance using the OpenAPI or RAML specifications, generate API documentation,
manage access and usage policies for APIs, test and debug the execution of API,
including security testing and automated generation of tests and test suites,
deploy APIs into production, staging, and quality assurance environments, and
coordinate the overall API lifecycle.
Developer portal/API store: community site, typically branded by an API provider,
that can encapsulate for API users in a single convenient source information and
functionality including documentation, tutorials, sample code, software development
kits, an interactive API console and sandbox to trial APIs, the ability to
subscribe to the APIs and manage subscription keys such as OAuth2 Client ID and
Client Secret, and obtain support from the API provider and user and community.
Reporting and analytics: functionality to monitor API usage and load (overall hits,
completed transactions, number of data objects returned, amount of compute time and
other internal resources consumed, volume of data transferred). This can include
real-time monitoring of the API with alerts being raised directly or via a higher-
level network management system, for instance, if the load on an API has become too
great, as well as functionality to analyze historical data, such as transaction
logs, to detect usage trends. Functionality can also be provided to create
synthetic transactions that can be used to test the performance and behavior of API
endpoints. The information gathered by the reporting and analytics functionality
can be used by the API provider to optimize the API offering within an
organization's overall continuous improvement process and for defining software
Service-Level Agreements for APIs.
Monetization: functionality to support charging for access to commercial APIs. This
functionality can include support for setting up pricing rules, based on usage,
load and functionality, issuing invoices and collecting payments including multiple
types of credit card payments.
Market size
A number of industry analysts have observed that the size of the market for API
management solutions has been growing rapidly from the early 2010s. Gartner
estimated the size of the market for API management to be $70 million in 2013 and
to be growing at 40% a year.[4] According to Forrester Research, in the US alone,
annual spend on API management was $140 million in 2014, expected to grow to $660
million by 2020 with total global sales are predicted to exceed a billion dollars
by that year.[5][6]
Products
The wide adoption of APIs led to the emergence of off-the-shelf API management
products, open-source projects, and SaaS offerings. Both Gartner[7] and Forrester
Research[8] list a number of API management vendors in their reports. Companies
listed by both as being active in API management space and other organizations
working this area include
Opensource
WSO2
Proprietary
3scale (now owned by Red Hat[6])
Software AG
Apigee (now owned by Google)
Asseco
Axway (acquired Vordel)
CA API Management [9] (formerly Layer 7[10], acquired by CA Technologies)
DreamFactory
IBM API Connect [11][9]
Kong Inc.
Microsoft (Azure API Management)
MuleSoft
New Relic
NGINX (NGINX Controller[12])
Oracle API Platform Cloud Service[13][14]
Rogue Wave Software (acquired Akana)
Runscope
Sensedia (part of CI&T[7])
SmartBear
