API Management

API Management is a set of processes, policies, principles, and practices that allow owners to gain control over their API. The integrated systems that make-up API management are born out of a large set of questions that project managers, developers, and team leads hope to answer.

• Is our API secure?
• How can we handle who accesses the API?
• What’s the best design?
• Can we effectively monetize its use?
• How do we know what’s happening at all times?
• How will the API evolve?

Fortunately, with the rise of API infrastructures, many other people have been forced to answer these same questions. Their answers turned into guidelines, best-practices, and specifications. Additionally, API management tools became available to help teams out as they encountered tedious or difficult tasks.

We hope to explain the different components of API management. Giving you the knowledge and tools to take control of your API.

API Management Components

Below are the various aspects of proper API management. Each section contains a description and a link to explore that component in depth.

API Design Types

Design informs managers of constraints. It’s beneficial to know how the API is designed to work. Choosing the right API design for the project can be critical to understanding how users access the API, or how the API scales. It’s recommended, when designing an API, to comply with an API specification. Some of the most popular include OpenAPI and AsynchAPI.

One of the common design architectures for APIs is REST. Before the introduction of RESTful architecture, there were SOAP APIs. Other considerations for API design include versioning, authorization, supported data formats (i.e JSON, XML), and supported query types.

Finally, in the last decade, open-source technologies have upgraded the design landscape for APIs. In 2011, Apache Kafka was introduced for stream-processing and, in 2015, GraqhQL was released to the public and has added another layer of decisions for an API’s design. If you are looking for a place to start, API design is the recommended component.

Learn about API Design

Explore RapidAPI Design

API Gateway

An API gateway is responsible for processing incoming API requests and orchestrating the delivery of resources from the API.

The gateway determines if the request is authorized to access resources. Then, it’s sent off to the resource. The resource could be a microservice, authentication server, load balancer, or cache manager.

Related: API Management vs API Gateway

If an organization had several API resources, authentication and orchestration would happen on every resource. Gateways add another layer of network abstraction to free up the resource.

Learn About API Gateways 

Learn About Multiple API Gateways

API Analytics

Analytics is data collected from the API. This data typically involves usage statistics. The most common statistic in API analytics is latency. How long does it take for the request to complete? 

Latency is useful because it involves many factors. A single request has many facets, including:

• Location
• Endpoint
• Request size
• Response size
• Environment

Understanding your API’s analytics is like reading the results of a blood test to determine the health of your API. It’s important to have the ability to check in on your API and work to improve its functionality.

Continue Reading About API Analytics

Developer Portal

Portals are a workspace. It’s where programmers enter the world of their APIs and applications. Like stepping into the office and sitting down at your desk, a portal is a place where work is done. It’s easy to confuse RapidAPI’s marketplace with a developer portal. However, there are key differences between the two.

For example, marketplaces are built for hundreds of APIs and have multiple teams creating, consuming, and interacting in a community. Portals are designed for interacting with a handful of APIs as part of one team or organization.

Developer portals are how developers understand, interact, adopt, monitor, and govern new technologies.

Read More About Developer Portals

API Lifecycle Management

You have probably heard about the lifecycle that products go through. Similarly, APIs have life cycles of their own.

Understanding common API lifecycle patterns can help managers plan for future changes and prevent common API pitfalls. Many of the components discussed in this article are part of the API lifecycle, for example:

• Design
• Secure
• Monetize

Additionally, delivering APIs is a continuous process. API management needs to identify the stakeholders of each lifecycle, and how the cycle turns over with each version or iteration.

Learn more about API Lifecycle Management

API Monetization

Monetizing your APIs should be a straightforward process. Users can access the API’s resources based on their subscription level. Furthermore, management can control usage, set quotas, grant access, and determine appropriate pricing levels.

Different types of pricing plans include free, pay-per-use, and paid plans (quota or unlimited access). Determining the right monetization strategy depends on the organization and API.

Learn How To Monetize Your API

API Security

No management is complete without the peace of mind of API security. Additionally, API safety depends on the other management components, like:

• Design
• Gateway
• Tooling

Developing an approach to security and policies is vital for maintaining a secure API ecosystem. However, it begins with an understanding of topics like CORS, API Keys, authentication, and authorization.

Learn More About API Security Best Practices

API Management Tools and Solutions

The effectiveness of managers depends on their tools. Leveraging API management solutions to common API problems can do more than cure a headache. Conversely, given the multitude of products, it can be difficult to filter through all of the available API tools on the market.

Thankfully, RapidAPI regularly compiles lists consisting of the top tools for API management, monitoring, and testing.

Top API Management Platforms & Tools

How RapidAPI Can Help

RapidAPI is an organization dedicated to the developers, teams, and organizations that rely on APIs every day. The platform allows users to find, connect to, and manage thousands of APIs.

API Solutions

• API Marketplace The world’s largest API Marketplace to find, connect to, and manage APIs.
• Teams Centralized workspace to share and collaborate on APIs and micro-services.
• API Enterprise Hub A private, white-labeled marketplace for developers, partners, and customers to find and connect to a company’s APIs.
• API Testing Create and manage API tests from development to deployment.
• API Design Accelerate API delivery with RapidAPI Design by Paw – a fully-featured API client to debug, test, and interact with APIs.

API Resources

RapidAPI provides a repository of helpful API resources. Gain insight and collect knowledge with Whitepapers, Ebooks, Webinars, Videos,  and Last Call—the extensive RapidAPI blog.

FAQs