Universal API Management and its Positioning
Written by Afsa Ashraf
Content WriterAccording to a recent study, in every major organization, there are about 500 APIs used, each of which performs a specific purpose and is used in a variety of contexts and architectures. Finding, administering, and securing the organization's APIs provide difficulties for IT.
Since the API sprawl restricts how a team may develop new capabilities and customer experiences, it will impede the business from realizing its vision of agility and composability.
Organizations must use universal API management capabilities to maximize the value of the existing technological infrastructure in order to provide agility and composability.
Introduction to Universal API Management
The latest milestone in API administration is known as universal API management, which gives APIs that are created and deployed in any environment or design full lifecycle management capabilities. It consists of a group of both new and old solutions that offer a single control plane to enable thorough visibility, adaptable management, and uniform governance of APIs at scale, regardless of their size, language, or cloud.
Customers will have access to a single control plane through the universal API management platform, a combination of new and current solutions that will offer thorough visibility, adaptable management, and uniform governance at scale. It is the next step in the evolution of API management, allowing APIs that are developed and deployed anywhere to benefit from full lifecycle management features. Enterprises will be able to interact with their internal and external API ecosystems while working with APIs of any origin, in any architecture, and environment thanks to Universal API management. Mule Soft's objective with universal API management is to assist our customers in the following ways with new and updated products:
- Accelerate application delivery: Compose services throughout the company using any API created by any team, on any platform, to hasten the delivery of applications.
- API Design Center (updated): Developers can now create APIs using GraphQL in DataGraph (available now), or the AsyncAPI specification in API Designer, in addition to the features provided today (Available now).
- Anypoint CLI (updated): Using their CI/CD pipelines, developers can now automatically catalog, discover, and reuse API specifications created on any platform into Exchange.
- Build modern architectures and applications: By controlling and protecting any service at scale, regardless of its size, language, or cloud, you can create contemporary structures and applications.
- Flex Gateway: A gateway that fully interacts with DevOps and CI/CD processes allows control and security of APIs running anywhere with extremely quick response times and a small footprint.
- Achieve consistent security and governance: Establish uniform security and governance for all APIs working in all environments.
- API Manager: Control services and users from a single control plane. With contextual insights, developers may raise the trustworthiness of their APIs.
- API Governance: Ensure uniform quality and compliance across all APIs without increasing development costs with API governance.
- Create vibrant API ecosystems: Increase the value of your API investments by building thriving API ecosystems.
- Anypoint Exchange: Consolidate all business APIs into a single source of truth and turn your APIs into products.
- API Community Manager: Create pixel-perfect user interfaces to publish your APIs for your API communities.
- API Experience Hub: Build developer portals quickly with fully developed templates that will allow you to publish APIs from Exchange to any audience.
Universal API Management & Digital Transformation
Businesses now place a greater emphasis on remote work environments and digital client interactions, and they take additional physical and digital safety measures. Business executives are attempting to enact radical change in the post-pandemic world amid this digital transition. But because of different limitations imposed by their dispersed infrastructure, many of them struggle to deliver on this.
The composability spans the gap between existing enterprise silos and the current state to the quick and agile vision that leaders desire. It assists in transforming the monoliths into building blocks that can easily combine and deliver the innovations of the present components.
The Gap Preventing the Transition
Leading consumer brands are establishing standards for the seamless integration of digital advertising experiences that consumers now demand from vendors. Businesses struggle to provide consistent customer experiences because of their siloed operations and disparate technology architectures. Large businesses run independently inside their business units, focusing on various use cases and goals. Diverse technology stacks are used by every business unit that operates in a heterogeneous setting.
Enterprises establish siloed digital ecosystems for each business unit by allowing each to be in charge of its own technology requirements. The company is unable to offer the services that necessitate information sharing across several technological stacks.
How Universal API Management can Help your Organization?
Let's examine some of the ways that UAPIM can make your company run more smoothly.
Developers
Developers are now readily able to address sophisticated API-led connections and create seamless customer experiences thanks to the flexibility to design APIs in new specifications like AsyncAPI and GraphQL. Flex Gateway and API catalog CLI, for example, fully interact with DevOps and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows across the lifecycle and provide the performance needed for the most demanding applications, streamlining development and manageability.
Numerous API gateway alternatives from cloud vendors, open source gateways, and more are available, and each one aims to address a specific use case to a variable degree. API owners seek a gateway that can seamlessly integrate with their current technological environment, CI/CD pipelines, and development lifecycles while satisfying a variety of use cases. Flex Gateway may manage classic north-south traffic patterns, act as a container sidecar for east-west traffic, or act as an ingress controller across any container cluster thanks to its ultrafast response times and tiny footprint. Additionally, Flex Gateway can be controlled by the web interface or declarative configuration files, operating essentially in any environment and effortlessly integrating with any CI/CD workflow.
API Product Managers
The ability to create a single source of truth for all enterprise APIs in Anypoint Exchange will make every corporate API discoverable and reachable. Each API in this global catalog is capable of being packed and managed to a specific quality standard, which makes them consumable. It will be simple to create, expand, and engage internal and external API communities with the help of fully templated developer portals built on API Experience Hub.
Architects
The notion that governance is a vital element that hinders progress has persisted for a long time. In a first of its kind, architects will be able to control APIs to consistently high quality and security to abide by industry requirements (such as GDPR, HIPAA), as well as internal standards like naming conventions, infosec guidelines, and more, while enabling developers to maintain delivery pace. Architects can enable developers to seamlessly add pre-defined governance controls to APIs during development for real-time validations and to shorten review cycles in development by providing a central repository of governance rules and best practices.
How Royal Cyber Can Assist
Royal Cyber makes sure that any venture made by the companies in new technology will be durable making it a reality by constructing your organization with the components of universal API management on an open, adaptable, and scalable platform. Your business may quickly embrace digital transformation with the help of Royal Cyber's expertise in Universal API Management.
You may find this blog "The Complete Guide to API Integration and Universal API Management" interesting.
Our services are supplied using cutting-edge methodologies, technologies, and products that can hasten the adoption of universal API management for a digital transformation, and they are tailored to the demands of our clients. We have an expert team who can assist our clients in creating an integration platform that is future-proof. Get in touch with our specialists to get started on your journey toward digital transformation, which is currently a reality. For more information, you can email us at info@royalcyber.com or visit www.royalcyber.com.
