Simplify Monetizing, Productizing, Securing, and Managing APIs with WSO2 API Manager 3.0
- Nuwan Dias
- VP and Deputy CTO - WSO2
APIs are the essential building blocks of digital businesses - assembling data, events, and services from within the organization, throughout ecosystems, and across devices. This is driving new demands for organizations to create and monetize APIs and API products, maximize adoption and reuse across internal and external portals and API marketplaces, and ensure API security. With the new WSO2 API Manager 3.0, we have added significant new functionality to optimize the productivity of software developers, API publishers, and API consumers.
We are proud to say WSO2 API Manager 3.0 is the only complete open source platform for creating, managing, consuming, and monitoring APIs and API products!
Recent Developments to WSO2 API Manager
The previous major product release of WSO2 API Manager (version 2.6.0) was announced in October 2018. Since then, our team members and open-source contributors have worked on re-architecting the product’s user interface; they have also worked on a number of component-level releases, for example, integration with Istio and PingIntelligence. These releases have enabled our product to utilize artificial intelligence to prevent API attacks, and, with the integration with Istio, bring full lifecycle API management capabilities to microservices without the need for a separate microgateway.
Earlier in the year, we launched WSO2 API Microgateway 3.0 - part of the WSO2 API Manager platform - to simplify the process of creating, deploying and securing APIs within distributed microservices architectures. WSO2 API Microgateway 3.0 provides a cloud-native, lightweight, developer-centric, and decentralized API gateway for microservices.
What’s New?
WSO2 API Manager 3.0 adds capabilities to deliver a seamless, end-to-end API management experience. New functionality includes:
- API product creation with functionality for API product managers to combine related APIs into a single, monetizable product. This enables true API product management, enabling enterprises to create and manage new business models, whilst simplifying the subscription process.
- Redesigned API designer and developer portals that offer responsive user interfaces and are easier to customize using the single-page application model and React.js library.
- The first full lifecycle API management solution to offer a native API operator for Kubernetes, simplifying API management and configuration in a cloud native environment. This means that managing and configuring APIs become a core part of the Kubernetes platform, closely integrating with existing management tools. The result is higher productivity for developers, DevOps, and cloud administrators when building, deploying, and managing APIs.
- Support for GraphQL APIs for building high-performance, data-rich APIs.
- Out-of-the-box API monetization via the Stripe billing engine, plus support for plugging in other billing implementations. Publishers can implement billing plans that align with their business models, maximize revenue, and attract API subscribers by offering a range of options.
- Ready-built pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) based on Kubernetes and Jenkins to shorten delivery times, whilst ensuring increased testing and quality assurance. WSO2 API Manager also works seamlessly with existing CI/CD pipelines to create a complete end-to-end CI/CD approach.
- Integration with Istio service mesh to bring API management capabilities to microservices.
- Expanded security through JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication support, bot detection, and API schema validation.
The proliferation of APIs driven by digital initiatives is viewed as a virtual goldmine by hackers. At WSO2, we have prioritized addressing the rapidly evolving security attacks on APIs by expanding on the robust policy-based controls for authentication and authorization in WSO2 API Manager. Earlier this year, WSO2 delivered an open source extension to WSO2 API Manager that enables enterprises to take advantage of the artificial intelligence (AI) powered API cybersecurity of PingIntelligence for APIs. WSO2 API Manager 3.0 further advances security through these new capabilities.
Get Started
WSO2 API Manager 3.0 is available now and it does not carry any licensing fees, as it’s released under the Apache License 2.0. WSO2 API Manager is also backed by WSO2 Subscription. To learn more about the latest features, check out this article.