[WSO2 Integration Summit San Francisco 2019] API Management in a Cloud-native Service Mesh Era

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” - In this world of disaggregated, cloud native architectures, developers are increasingly adopting micro services to build Complex Systems. APIs play a huge role in creating a sustainable platform and a good API driven micro services design is key to building and scaling these complex systems. Whilst API Management and API Gateways have traditionally been used for north-south communication, Service Meshes and specialised gateways have emerged to handle complexity for East-West communication.

The “parts” work, but is the “whole greater than the sum of its parts”? That’s the objective of this talk. We apply method to madness, and take a critical look at the role of APIs in cloud native, service mesh driven complex system design. We will look at how various API technologies including full lifecycle API Management, API Gateways and Micro-gateways, API Proxies and frameworks to build on-the-fly gateways play with Service Meshes like Istio and LinkerD, proxies like Envoy and ingress gateways. We will also look at practical examples of how full lifecycle API Management play an important role in Service Mesh based K8S Infrastructure.