3 Reasons Your Company Should Use 3scale API

APIs (application programming interfaces) are not a recent invention, but they have become a major force in the past decade. These interfaces allow products and services to interact with each other without determining how they’re implemented, saving time and money on development. By allowing companies to provide access to resources in a secure and controlled way, APIs create the potential for innovation and enhance flexibility and simplicity.

In this post, we outline why APIs have become a key component to digital transformation in recent years, discuss some of the challenges with API integration, and show why Red Hat 3scale API Management is the ideal solution for companies seeking to manage their APIs.

APIs: The Key to Business Success

With digital transformation at the heart of so many organizations’ ambitions, APIs have assumed a pivotal role. The growth in cloud computing, a key plank of digital transformation, has been key to their growth. Digital transformation relies on a combination of Agile integration technologies, Agile delivery methods, and cloud-native platforms to facilitate faster, more secure software delivery.

The increasing pace of digital transformation is driving the rate of change to business models, processes, and applications, giving firms with the ability to adapt quickly an advantage over their rivals. In fact, a 2018 Forrester Research report called “The Integration Imperative of Digital Experiences” found that companies need an Agile combination of integration and custom development to avoid losing market share to competitors that do put the customer first.

With speed of the essence in the battle to win and maintain customers, APIs offer obvious benefits in the form of streamlined functionality and flexibility. Businesses are using APIs to engage with partners more efficiently, so that they can work together to create new generations of applications that give consumers more choice and better service.

Although APIs offer huge potential for companies to deliver greater business value, the setup and control of your API infrastructure will determine whether your organization fulfills that potential. Full life-cycle API management has become increasingly important, as companies become more reliant on a growing number of increasingly complex APIs. 

APIs: The Challenge

Stories about cloud native companies with open APIs abound everywhere. Facebook, Uber, airbnb, and Pinterest may come to mind. These enterprises had the fortunate advantage of engineering their digital products from the ground up using modern computing infrastructure: cloud native, containers, orchestration and API gateways. Therefore, it has always been “easy” for these companies to engage strong developer communities and enable access to their digital platforms. 

However, this is not always the case for businesses who have been offering products and services for anywhere from 20 to 200 years. For IT decision makers in these companies, many of their core applications were designed in a “pre-API” world. Digital transformation consists of the tradeoffs of replatforming greenfield applications vs incrementally enabling brownfield applications. It is a difficult choice as many of these applications require uptime, are used by millions of people daily, and have significant regulatory hurdles. 

One challenge that both new cloud native or traditional companies share is true lifecycle management of APIs. As all applications become cloud native and integrate with other cloud native applications, modifying APIs can have disastrous effects. For example, there have been numerous stories over the years where social media companies make incremental changes to their APIs, causing large swaths of applications in their ecosystem to malfunction. 

APIs: The Solution

Red Hat 3scale API Management makes it easy to manage your APIs for internal or external users. It provides a common gateway for lifecycle management for all internal applications. For cloud native businesses, it provides a comprehensive API lifecycle tool that can keep up with an agile CI/CD development without creating risk to developer ecosystems. For traditional enterprises, 3scale offers a complete API gateway “out of the box” providing brownfield applications access to its features without significant refactoring of critical applications while also maintaining the proper security and regulatory controls.  

How 3scale API Infrastructure Takes Care of API Management

Red Hat® 3scale API Management means you can secure, distribute, control, and monetize your APIs on an infrastructure platform designed for performance, customer control, and scalability. You can install your 3scale components on your premises, in the cloud, or using a combination of both platforms. Here are three of the main benefits of using 3scale API Management:

1. Centralized Control of Your API Program

Organizations may use APIs internally to orchestrate a new business process or externally as part of a new product. Either way, adopting a deliberate approach to API management  throughout the API life cycle can assist with discoverability, serviceability, and monitoring. With 3scale, you can centralize control of analytics, access control, monetization, developer workflows, and other aspects of your API program. Centralization is facilitated by a distributed cloud layer.

2. High Availability and Performance

With organizations becoming more reliant on APIs, it is vital that your API infrastructure offers high availability. 3scale’s web-scalable architecture offers uptime guarantees of 99.99%, carrying hundreds of millions of API calls every day. In addition, latency and round trips are never an issue between your infrastructure and Red Hat 3scale API Management.

3. Integration

You can create your API by integrating with Red Hat Fuse, a distributed, cloud-native integration platform. Once the API is created, configure your API gateway on Red Hat OpenShift, an open source container application platform based on the Kubernetes container orchestrator. You can then control and distribute gateways in local, cloud, or on-premise deployments using the same stack.

Conclusion

In addition to centralized control, high availability and performance, and seamless integrations, 3scale also offers hybrid cloud support across all components, so that you can design your API management in the way that suits your organization. To see how Red Hat 3scale API Management could work for you, check out Stone Door Group’s 3scale API Accelerator. Accelerators are software and services solutions that enable enterprises to offer internal and external developers, customers and partners quick seamless API access to emerging digital platforms. 

About the Author

Bryan Croft is a Red Hat Certified Engineer, Senior Architect and OpenShift expert for Stone Door Group, a DevOps solutions integrator. Stone Door Group demystifies seemingly complex digital transformation projects through approachable, practical and measurable technical implementation. To learn more, drop us a line at letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com.