Episode 3: API Management

Third part of "Two Minutes Quick SAP Business Technology and Cloud Architecture Series" : SAP API Management?

Design best-practice architecture / services that controls the information you provide to your partners, customers, employees, SaaS services and external applications in a modern, secure, standard, controlled and governed approach while holding the flexibility and agility.

Think of API(Application Programming Interface) as a modern way of opening up your data as a service to your partners, customers, employees in a controlled manner.

Although we were already doing this with web services and/or other integration methods,?APIs are positioned as modern way of integrating cloud and on prem applications in a more standard way, therefore consumption, publishing and management of these services are easier and effective.??

Motivation for API Management

With the requirement of reaching data more quickly in an instant manner, companies are facing an issue to expose their data and services to their customers, partners, employees; connecting with cloud and SaaS applications etc. in a more quick, standard, easy way but at the same time without losing control over what and how it is shared.

API Management technology helps in this sharing process, enable developers to consume these assets in new channels, devices, and user interfaces.?This technology helps to gain better insights about consumer needs. Companies by this way can empower employees and partners with access to critical information and increase reach to a wider customer base. The motivation is simply letting your stakeholders to reach the information you control and provide them, quickly-easily, in a standard but governed structure.

What .. is it?

?SAP API Management is a cloud service/tool that enables provisioning, governance, security and scalability of enterprise information for digital access. It provides services for one experience for managing and monitoring APIs across various data platforms (SAP and non-SAP) with real-time analytics and reporting on usage metrics.

Who .. to use it?

Your application developers use it to expose your data in a more secure and controlled way to outside and inside parties, at the same time it's discoverable by third party developers and applications via a standard documentation.?Administrators can then bundle these APIs as products, manage them in a more governed way and apply policies flexibly. (security, rules, traffic etc.)

How.. to use it?

You can expose your APIs, services or third party APIs to outside / inside parties with wrapping and combining them together with configuration via API management.

While doing this you can apply security policies(BasicAuth, OAuth, SAML, API Keys etc.) to the services with different mechanisms which allows you to be more flexible and/or secure.

At the same time you can control the traffic of the requests with regards to the bandwith, number of calls which helps you to prevent overloading of your APIs, or use caching to let other parties to consume your services faster. (this also decreases the load to your backend systems)

You can intercept and modify what is being presented to the end users via API Management by filtering the content and/or transforming the formats. Without rewriting more and more services, you can publish restricted version of your one service to many different consumers in a different approach.

You can manage different versions of APIs, make them open/restricted/close to consumers in an on/off kind of approach.?

After your developers generated the APIs, you can make them discoverable by documenting in a standard way within a portal to other apps and developers such as a catalogue of your services as products.?This also become your API Portal where your have governance of your services.?

Last but not least you can have analytics for your APIs and services within SAP API Management to plan further actions.??

Where.. to see more?

See the detailed information from SAP Official Web Site

Last words

In this world of demanding business requirements, a good technical & enterprise architecture requires flexibility to connect to any system or vice versa quickly, with modern tools but within a controlled manner.?Thinking of integrations, APIs are a necessity in this modern design and SAP API Management?gives use a good toolset helping your best-practice and secure design approach.

In this journey, a good starting point would be exposing some of your requested information from your backend or other sources as APIs, combine these APIs as services to stakeholders and/or your applications and enjoying the flexibility of adding more and more services like a catalogue of your company's offerings while managing them in a holistic approach via your company's governance policy from start-to-end.?

Check for the other parts of the series

• Episode 1-?What is SAP API Business Hub in two minutes
• Episode 2- SAP Graph API