Top 5 API Management Tools

Postman

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Postman is used by several developers in my organization. This program is one of my primary tools in the development of web services/APIs and also in calling external web services. Prior to actually programming calls to external web services, this tool lets you try out calls passing parameters and viewing responses. Tweak as necessary, including authorization, and once satisfied, craft your software to do the same.

Pros and Cons

• Issue GET and POST calls to external APIs to verify headers and responses.

• Verify developed internal APIs.

• Build a library collection of useful API calls to be used as needed.

• The history of previous calls is easily searched to pull up calls to be modified and repeated.

• It is difficult to move a folder from one collection to another.

• It may be necessary to subscribe to the professional edition to get needed functionality. For example, sharing with teams with large collections would require the paid edition. So far, I have been able to use the free edition to do a substantial amount of work.

• Switching from team back to individual may result in lost collections that were archived. Export the archive before you do this so you can import it. This area can be confusing.

Oracle API Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Oracle API Manager is used to manage users, monitor traffic, analyze traffic, and enable secure and attributable API access to all connections. It enables software to securely give access to backend services and data sources to company staff and customers. Oracle API Manager is used in the IT Department as well as the Engineering Department in the development and management of Soap and Rest APIs.

Pros and Cons

• Secure and attributable connection to backend services and data sources.

• Tracking the use and access of APIs.

• Support and enable understanding of Soap and Rest APIs.

• More extensive documentation.

Amazon API Gateway

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon API Gateway works in conjunction with AWS Lambda functions and the Serverless framework to rapidly build microservices. This combination is very powerful, particularly for small development teams, because it allows us to delegate work to AWS; we can focus our development effort only on features that yield competitive advantages for our business.

Pros and Cons

• API Gateway integrates well with AWS Lambda. This allows us to build a web server in the language and framework of our choice, deploy it as a Lambda function, and expose it through API Gateway.

• API Gateway manages API keys. Building rate limiting and request quota features are not trivial (or interesting).

• API Gateway’s pricing can be very attractive for services that are accessed infrequently.

• API Gateway introduces some concepts, such as Stages and Integration Requests, that are foreign to most developers. The documentation hints in the Console help, but sometimes these concepts are not transferred to frameworks like Serverless.

• Systems that use API Gateway may behave differently in end-to-end tests in local or CI environments.

IBM API Management

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM API Management is used for API lifecycle management - for creating, managing and securing APIs. It is an extension of the DataPower gateway used to manage cross-functional APIs and services. It is used as an enterprise tool for socializing APIs through its discoverability and cataloging features. Performance, scaling and operational statistics are used to help identify hiccups or trends in service disruption.

Pros and Cons

• Import APIs - If you have an existing inventory of APIs and services, having an easy import process is required. IBM provides the ability to import Swagger so the process is quick and easy.

• Service Offerings - Can create plans to control various model offerings for varying clients depending on the need. You are not locked into a tier structure and can customize if a need arises.

• API Usage - visibility into the use of an API with a wealth of reporting information allows you to support an API from a production use to trending and forecasting any future growth.

Swagger Hub

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SwaggerHub is used to design API endpoints and documentation for our microservices architecture system. It works really well to be able to collaborate more easily on developing API. It also can test our API endpoint which makes an integration test easier when we deploy changes to the API.

Pros and Cons

• We can make comprehensive documentation of our API.

• Easy to share or use together for a collaborative project.

• Starts at a fairly reasonable price.

• Would be good to have better integration with third-party software, e.g. AWS Lambda, Postman, etc. for automatic testing.

• I would like to see the documentation to be able to convert to another format, e.g. MD file, wiki pages, etc.

• When using RESTful APIs from SOAP, it would be good if we could transform SOAP designed API to RESTful API.