APIs are digital building blocks that helps to unlock data and develop the API ecosystem by connecting enterprises systems and businesses. APIs foster the App development and enable API lead integration. It becomes utmost important to simplify the API provisioning, its management and provide seamless API consumption experience.
API Lifecycle Management
API lifecycle management covers the complete lifecycle of an API, right from API inception to its retirement. It starts with modeling an API by listing the supported operations. By following API first approach, API specification is used as an input to implement a backend service. To expose the developed service to the outside world via APIs, APIs should be managed by API Management solution. API Management solution helps in monitoring, managing and monetizing the APIs. There are rich set of policies in API Management solutions which can be applied to secure the API access, control and optimize the backend calls with traffic management policies or inject a business logic using extension policies. These managed APIs are further published to portal for developer engagement.
API Management in heterogenous landscape
API lifecycle management is simple if we are dealing with limited set of APIs, infrastructure and services. In the heterogeneous IT landscape where there is a possibility of solution and services from different vendors with different API gateways or multiple instances of an API Gateway, API Management becomes more complex.
Challenges with multiple API gateway in a landscape cover:
- API lifecycle management in individual API Gateway.
- Each gateway will have their own API provisioning workspace and portal to expose the APIs for discovery and consumption.
- To support specific business scenario, if same API should be available in two different portals, it adds redundancy of managing the same API in two API Gateways. This further complicate the maintenance activities like policy updates while keeping then in sync and thereby increase the probability of errors.
- Developers onboarding, offboarding and their management in different portals.
- For API consumers, they have to get onboarded in different portals to view the complete list of APIs and for specific API consumption.
API Business Hub Enterprise - New Offering
Considering the above listed challenges, we started with the hypothesis validation and have come up (also based on feedback from Executive Advisory Board customers) with our new offering - API Business Hub Enterprise.
Value Proposition of API Business Hub Enterprise covers:
- Central API catalog for application developers which is API Gateway agnostic and can list APIs from SAP and non-SAP API Gateway.
- Multiple Instances of SAP API Management can publish the APIs to central API Business Hub Enterprise.
- Easy import of ‘Externally Managed APIs’. Based on business scenario, these APIs can be grouped with other set of managed APIs and can be published in API Business Hub Enterprise.
- Seamless search, exploration and discovery of the listed APIs.
- Expedite API consumption with client SDK and code snippets.
API Business Hub Enterprise offering is rebranding of Developer portal which include all the existing functionalities of Developer portal in addition to the above listed values. API Business Hub Enterprise is available with Integration Suite and SAP API Management native CF application.
API Business Hub Enterprise is like the customer’s instance of SAP API Business Hub. SAP API Business Hub provides the API catalog of SAP APIs covering SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors and other LoB APIs likewise API Business Hub Enterprise provides the API catalog by listing APIs from customer landscape. These APIs can be of SAP or non-SAP services, they can be managed by SAP API Management and available in API Hub Enterprise for seamless consumption.
We have started with first GA of API Business Hub Enterprise. With more feedback and request to support specific business scenarios we will roll out incremental value driven features in API Business Hub Enterprise.
Below listed blogs provide detailed steps on how to configure and publish APIs from API Portal (API provisioning workspace) of multiple SAP API Management instances to API Business Hub Enterprise and how to list Externally Managed APIs.
Publish APIs to API Business Hub Enterprise
Externally Managed APIs
