Today, Axway is announcing the release of API Server 7.2 designed to unify API management and update the lifecycle, management, delivery, and security of API use by development and operations teams—an important segment of modern day DevOps and services in general.

Dubbed a next-generation API Server, 7.2 is focused on standardizing business-to-business (as well as consumer and mobile) communication between products so that developers have one place to go that abstracts away the weird edges when new services are added and removed. To do this, Axway is claiming superior reliability and security as well as ease-of-use.

In the business parlance, once a box or a system is built, it still need to get used and when it comes to DevOps the way we make use of boxes is through an interface called the API. Every service exposes its API in a different way and as a result, any business that needs to make use of multiple services must also deal with an everchanging tapestry of APIs and libraries as they’re updated, changed, and upgraded to keep up with the market. As a result, we’ve spoken about the necessity of API management servers in the past with Level 7.
I spoke to John Thielens, Chief Architect, Cloud Services at Axway, about this and he said, “The API offering paradigm pervades the entire Axway offering.” With this server, Axway intends to derive and deliver a highly scalable, high performance, and secure API engine. The server and product already it’s own market presence in its own right.

To give it a leg up, the API Server has a very rich set of connectors for authentication and validation mechanisms, easily connected to something like Oracle or even Kerberos. Axway believes they’ve got one of the richest sets of authentication methods. And when it comes to security the product also a lot of connectors around encryption and confidential transmission.

Amid the intended features API Server 7.2 has:

• Very fine grained data access control. Doesn’t need that much coding, but it has a lot of power for choosing what is encrypted and how via access controls.
• Strong audit control, with a rich log of all transactions that can be used for an audit transaction capability — even for scaling and reliability — I see connecting it to something like Splunk here.
• Sentinel for long-term reporting and historical data.

The DevOps Angle

The interesting thing about the Axway API Server appears to be the addition of a developer portal designed to make producing a configuration quicker and easier than pouring over a documentation book (although that advanced nuts-and-bolts side is definitely available.) According to Axway, the management portal is designed to quickly allow the addition of APIs to the management interface and rapidly prototype them for the production system without needing too much work for common products.

To this end, a DevOps team could quickly integrate a new service into the API management without much fuss and then test it against the current infrastructure. At that point, if anything needed to be tweaked, it could be changed to fit into the existing internal ecosystem. After all, everything new needs to learn how to talk to what already exists and vice-versa and that’s exactly the job of an API server.

“Because of Axway’s focus on Enterprise API Management, Axway enables its customers to manage different groups of developers, who have different levels of API access,” Mark O’Neill, VP of Innovation (former CTO of Vordel) explained when asked about the developer community for Axway. “For example, an organization may outsource the development of a mobile app to a third-party systems integrator, and grant those developers access to just certain APIs. Teams of internal developers may be granted different levels of API access, to only those APIs which they need to use. This granular access to APIs is a key capability which sets Enterprise API Management apart.”

The developer portal and dashboard is a web-tool streamlined to give developers instant and rapid access to the API server’s engine and allow them not just to connect up new services, but to understand the connectors those services will apply. As a result, developers will have a nimble dashboard that can be viewed anywhere at the facility that will give them quick information, implementation, and ideas on how to proceed when adding or debugging an API.