What is API management?

Wondering “What is API management?”. It refers to the process of designing, building, testing, deploying, governing, securing, observing, and monetising the APIs. These steps collectively represent the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle). Using API management, a business or organisation can make sure their APIs are secure and consumable.

What are API management tools?

A Plethora of API management tools exists in the market, which eases the process of API management. Using the following tools, you can manage/scale your APIs effectively:

API Testing and Monitoring

IBM developed the API Connect Test and Monitor testing tool for zero code APIs. Using this tester, you can easily test API endpoints securely because of OAuth (protocol for authentication). It helps you automate various manual tasks. You can perform collaborative testing, validate APIs, schedule automatic testing, and manage API health.

SoapUI

The SoapUI features a user-friendly interface and caters for effective API testing. You can perform bulk testing and automate regression and compliance. Through SoapUI, users can test APIs XML bombs, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting.

JMeter

Apache Software Foundation developed JMeter, an open-source app facilitating web application testing. With the help of this tool, you can monitor performance and test RESTful APIs. Three main elements make up JMeter, including Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.

API Management Tools/Tasks

Using the above-mentioned API management platforms, you can perform the following tasks:

Portals for Developers: A platform where programmers can get insights on the credentials and information they need for API usage. You can get access to the documents, analytics, status for approval, and information on monetisation.  Besides this, you can also access other services and tools on the developer portal.

Development and Design: You can get access to multiple tools aiding the smooth building and designing of APIs. Through these tools, you can facilitate the usage of APIs for existing systems.

Testing: The various testing tools allow developers to perform multiple tests to assess the performance of APIs. You can perform functional tests, security tests, performance tests, and mock-up tests.

Gateways for API: Similar to the gatekeeper, the gateway ensures enforcement of API security requests and policies during operation. This ultimately ensures high-end security and authorisation.

Monitoring and Analytics: The monitoring and analytics tools give developers access to comprehensive operational metrics. The key metrics include revenue generation, total usage rate, business health, etc. This helps organisations or businesses speed up API reliability and deployment.

Management of Policy: Through policy tools you can get information on caching data frequency, way of protocol translation, and usage quota. It plays an essential role in API management by defining operations.

Governance and Security: The governance and security tools allow you to deal with authentication, authorisation, stable client connection identity, and abuse prevention. You can also secure your credentials using these tools.

Benefits of API management

Key notable advantages of the API management are:

API as a Product: API is not just a code but rather a product. You can sell it and earn handsome revenue. The API management tools allow businesses as well as individuals to cater to performance, security, and upgradation, as per user feedback. This way, developers harness the qualitative experience and get the most out of their APIs.

High-end privacy and security: Through access and identity management tools, developers can secure their APIs. Apart from this, developers take control of governance policy and encrypt their keys.

Anomalies Detection: You can automate API management using AI to retrieve insights on traffic and detection of anomalies. Instead, you can also deal with the response to anomalies.

Expanded Reach: Because of cloud hosting, developers, regardless of their location, get access to the API catalogues. No matter if the catalogues are external, mixture, or internal.

Reliability and Performance: You can connect API management platforms to other cloud aspects. This includes the CDNs (content delivery networks). Through this, you can double up reliability and performance around the globe.

Setup Business Streams: You can monetise your services as well as valuable data by making it readily available to API developers.

Read On: What are The Types of APIs?