The rapid growth of API (application programming interface) economy leads to a corresponding increase in the demand for API management platform.
These solutions help create, implement, monitor, analyze, secure, and manage apis throughout their life cycle.
According to some estimates, the global API management market is expected to grow at a rate of 32.9% per annum over the forecast period from 2018 to 2023, with a value of $1.2 billion in 2018 to $5.1 billion by 2023.
Because API management is becoming more important, many providers have begun to offer these services. Therefore, you must do your homework before choosing a solution that fits your needs.
In this article, I discuss the following five important factors in choosing a platform for managing both internal API and external API subscriptions:
Easy to use
manageability
governance
security
The width of the
Let me address these issues in more detail.
**1.** easy to use
Ease of use should be a major consideration when looking for AN API management tool, especially in an enterprise environment where you may need to control and manage multiple apis.
It helps if you evaluate how easy it is to get up and running with this solution. Regardless of the deployment method (such as cloud or on-premise), make sure the tool of choice is easy to install. Does the provider provide support, tutorials, or other resources to make the platform easy to deploy?
In addition, you should evaluate the ease of use of platform features. For example, is it easy for developers to perform searches to discover apis? Does it provide support for snippets of code to easily integrate apis into applications?
Is there an intuitive dashboard that provides analysis and quick insights into all the apis the team uses? Does the platform allow administrators to easily manage a group of developers?
In addition, the ability to easily customize the platform based on your organization’s branding is a great feature you’re looking for. It can help your API stand out and enrich your corporate brand.
**2. Manageability
Most organizations have diverse development, test, and production environments. For example, an enterprise may have different types of apis created using various technologies, geographically dispersed teams of developers, or deployment environments that span global data centers.
Therefore, manageability will be an important factor before the selection decision. With excellent API management tools, you can have a centralized platform to manage conflicts between environments and take full advantage of your apis.
You need an effective solution that will act as a single organization-wide hub to manage your apis from a single location. This way, you will avoid duplication of resources and ensure smooth integration of technologies.
Some of the factors you should consider include the efficiency of handling various team management activities, such as adding or removing users from your team, the ability to collate apis from multiple environments based on similarities in functionality or use cases, and the availability of reporting tools to manage API usage.
3. * * * *
Governance is a general term, usually used to refer to a broad range of API management, monitoring, and visibility requirements. It specifies the terms and conditions for exposing API data and functionality to a variety of consumers.
The right API governance solution should enable you to simplify and control API adoption, regardless of the size of your organization. It should allow you to write policies that make the API perfectly accessible to different roles inside and outside the organization.
Some of the features you should look for in an API solution include the following basic governance features: enforcing access management to prevent unauthorized intrusions; Perform audit trails to track malicious usage patterns; Analysis and monitoring to keep up with API performance.
A good platform also lets you keep track of API usage and control adoption by blacklisting or whitelisting the API.
4 * * * * security
Security is another critical consideration when choosing an API management platform. With the widespread adoption of apis, hackers seem to be shifting their focus from traditional targets to a new area that has not been exhaustively exploited: apis.
Because apis provide programmatic access to data and services, API documentation provides this highly transparent support, making it a soft target for malicious exploitation.
In fact, Gartner, a prominent research and consulting firm, predicts that API vulnerabilities will account for the largest number of attacks on most enterprise Web systems by 2022.
Therefore, security should not be a priority when choosing an API management provider. For example, you can evaluate whether the platform allows you to apply strong authentication and authorization measures to protect access to API programs.
5. * * * *
Finally, you should consider the breadth of platform functionality; That is, how comprehensive it is. Does it cover all the fundamental aspects of success in the entire API life cycle from development to deployment? These aspects consist of two phases – THE API consumer and the API publisher.
For API consumers, you should evaluate whether the tool addresses API development, integration, monitoring, and management.
For API publishers, on the other hand, API management services should address the following aspects: API design, creation, testing, security, and management.
With a comprehensive API management platform that can handle most of the complete API lifecycle management models, you can realize the benefits that API programs originally envisioned.
conclusion
As you are probably aware, choosing an API management provider is not easy. Therefore, it is critical to take the time to properly evaluate the platform and ensure that it meets your needs and preferences.
For me, I found that Eolinker provides the best functionality to make the day-to-day tasks of managing the API smooth and efficient.
Translation: www.eolinker.com