The projections show the global API market will reach USD 6263.00 million by 2028. It’s no surprise, given the growing popularity of APIs. Modern businesses extensively use APIs to unlock data and, in turn, create collaborative applications and connected customer experiences. APIs have been around for a while now, but with the exponential increase in cloud-based applications, they are now being produced and consumed at scale. The increased requirement to manage interconnected applications has created the need for API management.
Let’s explore API management and how an API management tool why you should implement it in your organization using API management software.
What is API Management?
API management is the process of creating, securing, publishing, and monitoring APIs. When you have to deal with a few APIs, you can easily embed security in the code and monitor their usage. However, as the numbers increase, most organizations (88%) find it challenging to manage APIs, making API management tools a necessity.
API management gives you centralized access to your enterprise APIs, enabling you to easily enforce security policies, control access, and monitor API usage, so you can proactively debug any issues.
API management is the key to adopting a company-wide API strategy. It encourages API-led development and data exchange, which allows businesses to launch new initiatives faster and create seamless customer experiences.
What Does API Management Include?
API management includes the ability to manage the complete API lifecycle, starting from design and management to monitoring and consumption. Any good API management tool, has the following capabilities:
- API Design: It provides the framework for a user to create, test, and manage customized API flows.
- API Testing: It allows users to ensure that API is working as expected at every step of the design process as well as post-publishing.
- API Security: It authenticates and enforces API security policies at runtime to ensure secure sharing of data. API management platforms ensure improved data security and greater protection through authentication, authorization, and policy-driven firewalls.
- API Documentation: It makes it easier for third-party users to consume APIs by auto-generating OpenAPI specifications that can be reused for building applications and processes.
- API Monitoring: It allows users to monitor API usage, load, and other vital metrics and help them understand the success and health of APIs.
- Developers Portal: An API store or community site that includes API documentation, tutorials, and a marketplace to subscribe to APIs and manage their subscription keys.
Benefits of an API Management Tool
Investing in an API management solution is a wise choice. Here is what it can do for you:
Secure Data Sharing
APIs allow you to share critical enterprise data with internal and external partners, so maintaining security is one of the most important activities of any API management initiative. According to a Postman survey conducted on 37,000 developers and API professionals, 20% of respondents reported that API security incidents or breaches happen at least once per month at their organizations.
API management solutions come with extensive security and authorization features, which help ensure that your APIs and data remain protected.
An API management tool also gives insights into real-time API activity, which allows you to identify potential security vulnerabilities in networks, operating systems, and API components beforehand. As a result, you can pinpoint the root cause of security issues and deal with them proactively.
An Agile Approach to Development
API management enables you to design, test, publish, manage, and analyze all APIs in a single platform. Modern API management solutions are fully-automated, saving you time with manual tasks such as testing, deployment, or generating documentation. Additionally, they save you the trouble of writing code when creating and publishing any endpoint, reducing costs and time to market.
Additionally, API management tools improve API usability, so you can rapidly launch new initiatives to support changing business requirements.
Automation Equals to Time Saving
Developers spend a considerable amount of their time designing, testing, deploying, and managing APIs. According to the 2022 Postman State of API Report, over 40% of developers spend more than 20 hours a week working with APIs — almost a third of which is spent creating APIs through coding and programming. The manual work can be an enormous burden on IT resources, especially when managing APIs on a large scale.
Automated API management solutions, such as Astera’s, accelerate API creation and publishing by automating most activities, like testing, error handling, pagination, etc. This enables you to spend more time on strategic tasks.
Insight-Driven API Development
A crucial part of API management is API monitoring. A modern tool API tool comes with dashboards and logging mechanisms that gives you an overview of key API metrics such as runtime statistics, API traffic, response times, and spikes. Additionally, it simplifies debugging by giving you detailed logs of processes and errors. You can use this data and insights to troubleshoot issues, and plan for future API development.
Maintain API History with Versioning
As trends and requirements change, APIs need to evolve. An API management solution ensures that you can make changes to your APIs without disrupting the underlying system. API management tools also have governance features that make it easier to keep a tab on different versions of APIs.
Astera API Management Solution – The Code-Free Way to Manage APIs
Astera offers a complete API lifecycle management and integration solution. The tool’s powerful built-in functionalities and visual drag-and-drop interface reduces API management to a few clicks.
Using Astera API Management solution, you can rapidly develop API endpoints and publish them as APIs within minutes, without writing a single line of code. By packing all powerful functionalities in one tool, Astera API Management allows businesses to deliver new solutions faster.
Astera API Management solution has the following capabilities:
- API Design: The tool has a vast library of built-in connectors, transformations, and query parameters to simplify API development. You can also use this to orchestrate data or task-intensive API pipelines. The designer also has an API consumption component using which you can integrate external APIs of payment services, social media, CRM, and ERP products.
- API Testing: Astera supports instant data preview, making design time testing easier. Once you have designed your API, you can immediately deploy it and generate automated test flows with one click.
- API Publishing: Once you have designed the API, publish it with just a few click in the cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments to share data and functionalities with external users.
- API Security: Astera has a built-in security framework with authorization and authentication features that lets you leverage bearer tokenization and implement access control.
- API Management: Through a centralized wizard, you can manage the critical elements of your API lifecycle. You can use it to gain API visibility, modify, activate and deactivate endpoints, and conduct run time tracing.
- API Monitoring: Visualize the performance metrics of your deployed APIs in a built-in dashboard to get extensive information on your APIs’ health. Additionally, the solution offers reports and logs for detailed analysis.
- Governance: Astera provides a centralized repository for all data artifacts. Some salient governance features include secure systems, lineage and impact analysis, version control, and sharing data artifacts.
Using Astera API Management solution enables you to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your APIs and turn API integration from a challenge into a strategic growth opportunity.
Are you interested in adopting an enterprise-wide API-first strategy to create collaborative applications and manage, access, and share data and functionalities with stakeholders and partners? Schedule a demo to learn more about our unified code-free API lifecycle management solution.