Basic Concepts

The need to go digital is at its peak right now and every individual and organization is transforming themselves in order to gain strategic advantage over their competitors. In order to do so, either you have to invest in completely new infrastructure to be able to expose secure backend services in the form of APIs which can lead to increased time to market and the risk of losing the competitive advantage. The smarter way is to use your existing backend services with an API Management platform which will help you expose your backend services in easy, secure and seamless manner.

Organizations expose their already built backend services in the form of APIs to be consumed by mass and to expand their reach. For example, when an organization wants its partners to get a quote of some product or services immediately, it can do so using an API Management rather than going into the traditional process of asking an internal department of the organization for the same and waiting to get the reply. The other scenario is in an online ticketing system where you want to get the ticket availability on your device instantly rather than going and inquiring on the ticket counter where a representative queries the internal system and lets you know the ticket availability. This is possible only when all these services are available in the form of APIs and are consumed by connected devices in an agnostic way.

What is API Management?

API Management is a solution that nurtures a community of developers that includes an entrance where people connect with each other and exchange best practices. This permits an organization to expose its protected resources by hiding the complications and uncover only those functions securely that are required by the end user.

What is App42 API Gateway?

App42 API Gateway is a comprehensive API Management tool to create, publish, monitor and monetize backend systems in the form of REST APIs which can be consumed by any device (Web, Mobile, Tablet, Point of Sale, Social, Smart TV) over HTTP/HTTPS. In addition to API creation, you also get some out-of-the-box functionalities like scalability, authentication and authorization, traffic management, monitoring and API versioning.

Benefits

• 1.

  Scalability:

  You don’t need to worry about the scalability of your resources exposed as APIs as it is implicitly taken care by App42. It also helps manage the traffic to your backend systems with IAM Management by filtering out the API calls as per your settings.
• 2.

  API Monitoring:

  With App42’s detailed analytics, you can see the metrics of your created and published APIs like how they are performing and take the actions accordingly.
• 3.

  API Versioning:

  App42 API Gateway enables you to create new versions of same APIs and keep the previous versions as well to support backward compatibility.
• 4.

  API Caching:

  You can also cache the responses for the configured time (TTL) in order to prevent unnecessary load on your backend systems.
• 5.

  Authentication and Authorization:

  With App42 API Gateway, you get readymade functionalities to apply authentication and authorization policies on your APIs to secure them. You can either choose key based authentication or OAuth.
• 6.

  Serverless APIs:

  In App42 API Gateway you can even create an API without hosting any backend systems. Just write your code and deploy it on the Gateway to expose it in the form of APIs.
• 7.

  Pay as you grow:

  Choose a plan that suits your pocket. Decide your choice by signing up for a 15 day free trial. For more information, please visit our pricing page.

App42 API Gateway Deployment Models

Keeping in mind the various requirements of different organizations where one of them may want to keep their protected resources inside their enterprise firewalls, another may not want to share their compute resources while others may not have any such restrictions, App42 API Gateway is created in multiple deployment models as mentioned below:

• 1.

  Multitenant:

  Multitenant or SaaS is a cloud hosted solution which is managed and monitored by App42 and can be accessed and used by multiple organizations or developers in a shared environment. This solution is best fit for small organizations that want to pay as they grow and have no problem in sharing their compute resources with others
• 2.

  On-Premise:

  On-Premise is hosted on the customer site (either in organization’s own data center or on cloud) which is managed and monitored by customers themselves. The solution is dedicatedly installed for the organization and is best fit for those who prefer to keep their protected resources inside their premises
• 3.

  Managed Service:

  Managed Service solution is dedicatedly hosted for the organization that neither wants to share the compute resources with others nor wants to maintain and monitor the infrastructure. The management and monitoring of servers is done by App42. This is best suited for those organizations that don’t want the hassles of server management
• 4.

  Hybrid:

  Hybrid solution is where you have both On-premise as well as Managed Service installation. There can be a requirement for an organization to keep some servers inside their protected environment and some can be hosted outside

  

  Multitenent	On Premise	Hybrid	Managed Services
  Shared resources	Runs on customers environment	Mix of both On-Premise & Managed Services	Customizations supported
  Pay as you grow	Remote server customizations supported	No resource sharing	Single bundled price (Infra + Products)
  Customizations not supported	Annual maintenance charges applicable	Partial server management	Dedicated hosting
  SLA – Best Effort	SLA – Limited	Increased servers cost	Committed SLA. Early access to new features