Newest Release of WSO2 API Manager Supports Swagger 2.0, Opens Product to Third-Party Key Servers for Authenticating API Consumers, Enhances Analytics

Open source WSO2 API Manager provides unmatched flexibility for deploying on servers, in the cloud, and with mobile and Internet of Things devices to support a range of API-driven applications

San Francisco, CA – June 18, 2015 – Managed APIs are central to enabling the connected business by extending processes and services to customers, partners, and other groups within the enterprise. WSO2 significantly enhances the API management experience for organizations of all sizes—from small to medium businesses (SMBs) to large global enterprises—with the launch of WSO2 API Manager 1.9, which is fully open source and runs on servers and in the cloud. With this latest version, WSO2 API Manager:

  • Becomes the first API management product to offer plugin support for third-party key servers, allowing enterprises to leverage their existing infrastructure to authenticate API consumers.
  • Supports Swagger 2.0, the open source API framework; provides a plugin for SmartBear’s Ready! API for API testing; and embeds the Swagger editor to enable the seamless representation of an API throughout its entire life cycle.
  • Adds to the API Store the ability to provide a shared view of applications and subscriptions within a group of users to facilitate collaboration.
  • Enhances API analytics by generating more statistics on API events providing additional analytics dashboards.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the API Days SF 2015 conference, which is focused on API design and strategy that supports the Internet of Things revolution. WSO2 is a Silver Sponsor of the event running June 17-18, 2015, at PARISOMA in San Francisco.

Version 1.9 is the latest release of WSO2 API Manager, the only 100% open source API management product—with no separate ‘enterprise’ version—to combine easy, managed API access with full API governance and analysis. It also is the first API management product to let IT organizations set up their own consumer-like API Store where developers can easily subscribe to and consume APIs. Meanwhile it provides API publishers with complete API lifecycle governance—from creating to publishing, deprecating and retiring APIs—as well as analytics and metrics to support decision-making and enforce service-level agreement (SLA) policies.

Significantly, the same multitenant, cloud-enabled WSO2 API Manager software can run on servers, in a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud environment, providing the flexibility to support a range of API-driven applications, from Web commerce to partner ecosystems and the Internet of Things, among others. Federated access to APIs across multiple entities empowers enterprises to create new models for collaborating and monetizing APIs. And because API management does not occur in a vacuum, WSO2 API Manager is pre-integrated with all other products in the comprehensive WSO2 platform, so developers can focus on building their solutions, not worrying about how to connect the underlying technologies.

“In today’s connected world, APIs are the keys to enterprises expanding their IT ecosystems and employing new models of collaboration and monetization across customers, partners and employees,” said Isabelle Mauny, WSO2 vice president of product management. “Through our 100% open source WSO2 API Manager, we are democratizing access to the enterprise-class API management functionality required to capitalize on these opportunities. Version 1.9 builds on our commitment to offer a true open-source approach to API management that supports the demands of SMBs and large enterprises alike, provides the same functionality on-premises and in the cloud, and can plug into any existing WSO2 or third-party infrastructure for maximum deployment flexibility.”

“Data is a very valuable asset for large organizations and making it easy to access that data via APIs has large returns," said Aaron Sandeen, former State CIO and co-founder of Zuggand, Inc. "WSO2 API Manager was central to the digital transformation strategy we implemented in Arizona. It enabled the State, as a massive enterprise, to share and aggregate siloed data spread across disparate agencies.”

Enhanced Experience for API Publishers and Consumers

WSO2 API Manager features an API Publisher, API Store, and API Gateway. Using WSO2 API Manager, IT organizations can publish both production and sandbox keys for APIs to enable easy developer testing, and developer interactions with APIs can be managed via comments and ratings. WSO2 API Manager supports SOAP, REST, JSON and XML-style APIs, and it enables one-click deployment to one or multiple API gateways for immediate publishing.

The API Store provides a collaborative Web interface for consumers to self-register, discover API functionality, subscribe to APIs, evaluate them, and interact with API publishers. API governance is complemented by capabilities for monitoring API use, performance and SLA compliance. Secure authorization of APIs is provided using the OAuth 2.0 standard for key management; meanwhile single sign-on is enabled through the Security Access Mark-up Language (SAML).

With version 1.9, WSO2 API Manager adds several new features designed to enhance the experiences of both API publishers and consumers.

Plug-in Support for Third-Party Key Servers: In addition to providing its own key server, the highly extensible WSO2 API Manager 1.9 now allows third-party key servers to be plugged in. As a result, enterprises that already have deployed a key server for authenticating users can use it with WSO2 API Manager to authenticate API consumers. Not only does this enable IT organizations to leverage their existing infrastructure investment; it also eliminates the redundancy of having to generate multiple keys for existing users. Version 1.9 also features enhanced integration with WSO2 Identity Server, which facilitates the automatic binding of applications created using WSO2 API Manager with service providers of WSO2 Identity Server.

Expanded Swagger Support: WSO2 API Manager provides a framework for testing and documenting what an API does based on the Swagger specification; it can generate documentation automatically, or publishers can create their own. With version 1.9, WSO2 API Manager upgrades from Swagger 1.2 to 2.0, and embeds the Swagger editor to seamlessly update the representation of the API across the entire life cycle—whether developers are creating, publishing, testing, managing or consuming APIs. Version 1.9 also features a plugin to newest version of SmartBear’s Ready! API, which supports Swagger 2.0. Using the plugin, users can import an API into Ready! API simply by providing the WSO2 API Manager connection details and selecting the API to test, creating a seamless experience.

Shared View of API Store: With WSO2 API Manager 1.9, the API Store adds the ability to provide a shared view of applications and subscriptions within a group of users to facilitate collaboration. Apps and API subscriptions (i.e., API keys) created by one user can be managed by other users within the same group. As a result, developers working on the same application can share the keys and see the statistics for an application in the API Store. Additionally, if one developer leaves, someone else in the group can still manage the subscription. Admins, who have access to multiple groups, can switch between the groups and view the respective apps and subscriptions accordingly.

Enhanced Analytics: WSO2 API Manager features an analytics framework that handles all API usage data published to it from the API Gateway. This framework is pre-integrated with WSO2’s analytics platform, which can perform both batch and real-time analytics on the same events, providing the ability to view metrics by user, API and more. It also allows IT professionals to create their own analytical apps to gain insights into APIs published with WSO2 API Manager or to plug in their own reporting engines for customized reporting. Version 1.9 now captures additional statistics based on throttling, faults, latency, workflows, approval/rejection of self-registration, subscription and app creation, and it provides dashboards for statistical visualization to provide greater insights into API performance and usage.

One Minute Start: WSO2 API Manager 1.9 enables customers to get up and running in just a minute using a new sample API that can be published with the click of a button when the product is launched for the first time. Then the user can sign up to the API Store, subscribe to that API, and test it, gaining a quick and easy understanding of how WSO2 API Manager works.

Proven Scalability, Flexible Deployment

WSO2 API Manager is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the award-winning WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all Carbon-based WSO2 products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses proven core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. WSO2 API Manager offers proven scalability, since it uses the same core technologies and runtime of WSO2 Carbon, which are handling anywhere from millions to billions of API calls per day at enterprises around the world.

Additionally, the componentized architecture maximizes the flexibility enterprises have when deploying WSO2 API Manager.

  • Because the software is cloud-enabled, WSO2 API Manager can migrate between servers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid cloud environments.
  • Any WSO2 API Manager components—including API Publisher, API Store, and API Gateway—can be decoupled and allocated to different compute resources, making it easy to scale to meet growing demand.
  • Enterprises can customize WSO2 API Manager by adding WSO2 Carbon middleware products or the 175-plus components on which they are based.

Availability and Support

WSO2 API Manager 1.9 is available today as a software download that can run directly on servers; on cloud platforms such as, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), OpenStack, and VMware VSphere; or on top of WSO2 Private PaaS. Additionally, customers can choose to have WSO2 host WSO2 API Manager through the WSO2 Managed Cloud service or on WSO2 API Cloud, WSO2’s public cloud at https://wso2.com/cloud/api-cloud. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 API Manager is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStartSM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 delivers on the promise of the connected business with the only completely integrated enterprise platform that enables businesses to build, integrate and manage their APIs, applications, and Web services on-premises, in the cloud, and on mobile devices. Leading enterprise customers worldwide rely on WSO2’s award-winning 100% open source platform and its robust governance and DevOps functionality for their mission-critical applications. Today, these businesses represent nearly every sector: health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology, telecom and more. Visit https://wso2.com or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook..

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