IBM API Connect

IBM API Connect is an end-to-end solution that quickly and easily allows you to create, run, secure and manage access to APIs. It provides a range of powerful capabilities through which you can discover or define your API, implement that API to connect with your existing backend services or create new microservices to expose data assets. API Connect also enables you to expose your APIs to your target application developers whether they are inside or outside your organization through a self-service Developer Portal that means new users of your APIs can be up and running within minutes.

IBM API Connect

IBM API Connect Overview

IBM API Connect is an end-to-end solution that allows users to create, secure, manage, socialize, monetize and analyze APIs. It provides a powerful set of capabilities from turning backend RESTFUL or SOAP services into managed services. This is done by publishing APIs to API Gateways, while enforcing lifecycle and governance controls on those APIs. API Connect enables users to expose APIs, through a developer portal, targeting application developers both inside and outside their organization. Additionally, the solution’s analytics tooling helps API providers and API consumers better understand the health and consumption of deployed APIs.

The major components of API Connect, as well as considerations for configuring different clouds and environments within API Connect so that users can be successful in their API strategies. It targets Solution and Integration Architects.

IBM API Connect Components

There are four different Components in API Connect 2018.4.1.x:

Management System (API Manager)

The Management Service provides two functional roles. The API Manager and the Cloud Manager.

The Cloud Manager controls the infrastructure of the API Cloud. This is typically only accessed by Infrastructure or Operation teams.
The API Manager controls the creation, publication and management of APIs.
It hosts the Cloud Manager user interface, targeting Will the Cloud Manager and his team
It hosts the API Manager user interface, which is leveraged by Steve, Jason and Shavon
Enables API provider lines of business to build and publish APIs
It contains a persistent database that is used to store the configuration data about the system
It contains a rich set of RESTFul and CLI commands to automate API Management tasks for your organization
It maintains and manages the connection to the user registries that validate both providers and consumers of APIs

Gateway Service

The API Gateway Service is the runtime component. It is responsible for responding to incoming API requests from client applications:

Validating that the application that is making the API call is permitted to access the API (i.e. has an active subscription to a product that contains the API operation)
Enforcing the security constraints defined by the API such as a requirement to authenticate using a protocol like Basic Authentication or OAuth 2.0
Enforcing rate limits so that the calling application cannot invoke the API more frequently than the API provider has specified.
Invoking the outbound request to the backend service or services that are defined in the API implementation, which may involve protocol transformation such as a RESTFul API calling out to a backend SOAP service
Aggregating responses from potentially multiple backend service calls and returning the relevant content of those requests to the original caller

Analytics Service

The Analytics Service is deployed separately from the API Manager. The Analytics Service is built on-top of Elastic Stack and provides the following:

Storing the API event logs as they are processed from the Gateway Service
Processing API event logs from the gateway.
Visualizing the aggregated metric data from the API events, so that API providers can better understand their APIs’ health and consumption
Surfacing the API calls raw log data to help developers debug
Off-loading the API event records to target locations (e.g. Splunk, Syslog, Kafka, HTTP, etc)

Developer Portal Service

The Developer Portal Service is the component through which APIs are socialized to application developers. The following functionality is provided:

Discovering the set of APIs and Products that are made available by an API provider
Registering of applications to API consumer organizations
Creation of an application’s credentials is required to authenticate and identify the application when making API calls
Host content, communities and forums on the Portal