Best practices and technologies for cloud API management and governance

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Introduction
  3. The cloud is the API and the API is the cloud
  4. API management and governance becomes critical for cloud success
  5. Emerging best practices
  6. The players
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About David S. Linthicum

1. Summary

Cloud computing’s continued growth has led to an increase in the use of APIs, which can abstract the complexities of back-end resources such as databases, platforms, storage, compute, and middleware. APIs provide developers and users with the ability to leverage and releverage services, allowing enterprise IT to construct applications from prebuilt component parts.

However, the number of APIs that exist within public cloud providers, or even around traditional enterprise systems, continues to increase well beyond most enterprises’ ability to manually manage them. What’s needed to address this is a new approach and a new technology to manage and govern these services. The use of API management and governance technology is the most logical path, but planning and deployment best practices are still required.

In this report, we’ll explore the concept of API management and governance, and look at its purpose and value as well as the details behind planning and deployment.

Key highlights from this report include:

  • API management and governance are absolute requirements for enterprises that work with more than 300 internal and external APIs. This is when the complexity reaches a point where APIs can no longer be manually managed.
  • API management and governance should provide core services such as discovery and the ability to limit use of the services around pre-determined criteria or policies.
  • The use of policies is the most logical path to manage and govern APIs, considering that they can be customized to do a variety of things that may be specifically important to the enterprise.
  • API management and governance are linked with security systems. These elements should work and play well together, especially those that leverage identity-based approaches.
  • Those who implement API management and governance should consider existing best practices and splurge on planning and testing.

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