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In the current world, every customer anticipates to have having their favourite services available in on the internet. Technology is right at the fingertip, accessed using gadgets such as Desktop computers, Laptops, Mobile phones, and tablets, increasing the mobility of services.
To reach out to more customers and to serve existing customers better, you need to bring your backend services onto the web. You can expose a variety of services ranging from the pricing of a product, stock status, ordering, tracking them and many more, as required by Client Applications. Once the services are made available, it is extremely crucial for those to be available to a large section of the community and simultaneously be protected from wide range of attacks to which your data becomes vulnerable when it is published on the internet.
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The exponential explosion of IT Assets and mobile devices provides new opportunities for Enterprises to interact with customers over new mobility and social channels. The imperatives of digital business have created an urgent need for enterprises to innovative and evolve ways to exploit partner channels and third-party channels to reach out to a growing consumer - base. API Management is the underlying core technology that enables this change!
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In the modern digital business, customers require on-demand information on mobile devices, partners need real-time information via web - channels, programmatic APIs and other channels and third-party application developers (both independent and business partners) require secure, managed access to internal enterprise information. The enterprise needs to dynamize existing static data as well as internal applications to create new business opportunities.
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Modern enterprises require a Secure, Monitored, Metered and Managed approach to exposing enterprise data and applications. This is done via API Management solutions. API management servers allow enterprise data to be exposed in the form of REST or Web Services. REST is normally preferred because of its inherent flexibility. Each exposed REST Service is referred to as an “API”. The API can expose either enterprise data (form from a file, database or other enterprise systemsystems) or an internal enterprise application. In a typical enterprise, there may be tens to hundreds of exposed APIs running on and managed by the API Management platform.
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- Monitoring: This allows system administrators to track the APIs that use the most number of resources (CPU, memory etc.) and to graphically represent the related information to identify hotspots and contention. Using this information, system administrators may decide, for instance, to split API call-load over multiple API Management servers (provided that the underlying solution allows for this scaling-out process).
- Management: A high-level view of the overall implementation of API Management across the enterprise, including a synopsis of the security, metering and monitoring processes running across multiple servers within and outside the enterprise firewall.
- Developer Support and Socialization: Exposed APIs need to be marketed or socialized to third-party developers; this is typically done via Developer Portals, either within or external to the API management platform, where available APIs are published.
Figure 1: API Management – structured data and application access
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Fiorano API management implements features such as security, metering, monitoring, management and developer support. The Fiorano API management platform architecture scales linearly, allowing the infrastructure to grow on an as-needed basis. The API Management System appears as in the figure below.
Figure 2: Fiorano API Management System Architecture
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As depicted in the figure above, the Fiorano architecture scales linearly. As the number of APIs to be hosted increases, one deploys additional API Management servers in the form of ‘peers’. This allows distribution of load to be distributed across multiple servers, enabling a build as you grow strategy.
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Gateway server receives requests from users/customers and sends responses after processing the same at different Web Services as configured. The client requests are first received by these servers which act as a reverse proxy server for the backend REST/SOAP-based web services. These servers also perform the below activities:
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- Enables to define various API products, Clients, and Client Subscriptions.
- Enables to define various roles, environments, and partners.
- Helps to quickly analyze API trends and investigate resource utilization.
- Helps to monitor the Fiorano API Management deployment status.
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Self Signup support for developers allowing automatic subscription to Public APIs. The developer portal provides support to simplify the process of Developer On-boarding Onboarding and greatly simplifies the interaction of developers with the services published using API manager. Important functions include
- Support for secure self-signup for developers.
- Automated documentation for the APIs exposed in an engaging manner.
- Support for an automatic subscription for of selected API Products.
- Support for generation of OAuth access token for token generation for registered applications.
- Support to test the APIs exposed.
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