Applications Programming Interface (API) management is important for the future of any organization that has adopted the use of APIs. This is because they need a way to control, distribute, and analyze all the APIs that they use for the connection of their applications and sharing of data between them. Such management is required for the flexibility, growth, and agility of their businesses.
Businesses that fail to implement proper API management find it difficult to address the changing demands of their customers. This is because APIs allow businesses to come up with flexible applications that can be modified easily to adapt to these changes.
Proper API management is also important when businesses are looking for innovative solutions. APIs allow developers to implement their functionality into their applications, adding more features that they need to streamline their operations. In addition, this shortens the time developers take before releasing a software application.
What is API Management?
API management can be defined as the process through which organizations build and deploy applications while making sure that access is controlled, usage policies enforced, usage statistics collected and analyzed, the subscriber community nurtured, and reports on performance generated.
Some developers do not know the difference between API management and API gateway. While API management is the continuous process described above, API gateway is an API management tool that sits between back-end services and the client. The gateway accepts all the API calls, aggregates all the resources required by the calls, then returns the required response back to the client.
Measuring the Success of API Management
Successful API management is vital when it comes to making sure that APIs meet all their requirements. Businesses need to find ways through which they can understand how successful their API management efforts are. They can do that through a number of metrics, among them;
Speed to API
Successful API management should make it possible for businesses to develop, launch or adopt new APIs within a short period of time. In addition, businesses need to make sure that they can upgrade and onboard new developers quickly. Any API management efforts that make this possible can be considered successful.
Dependability
Dependability can be referred to as how APIs are made available to developers. It can be determined by finding out how many times an API experiences downtime. Businesses should find out whether their APIs are available for use or not, when they are not available, and how many calls can be made to the APIs within a specified time. Successful API management efforts will provide all this information.
Security
API management tools should provide businesses with ways of keeping their data safe. As discussed above, APIs access sensitive data and share it with other applications. This means that they are targets for criminals looking to illegally gain access to this data. This is something that should be taken care of by successful API management efforts.
Flexibility
API management tools should offer different options to developers adopting the APIs. This means that developers are able to use the APIs in different ways, using different languages to achieve the same goal. This is important when ensuring that developers use the API the way they want to, and in the languages they are comfortable with. This should be provided by API management.
Quality
The quality of API management can be measured in how the APIs meet the requirements of developers consistently. When implementing an API, developers will be interacting with the API every time their applications are communicating or exchanging data with other applications. If the process is not satisfactorily consistent, then it means that the API management efforts are poor.
Monetization
Every business needs to find different ways of generating revenue. When building APIs, they might want to either use the APIs internally or provide them to third-party developers. Successful API monetization efforts should show different ways through which businesses can monetize their APIs. They should also provide insights into different ways they (businesses) can increase the amount of revenue they are currently generating.
Cost
Running a business means finding the best ways to conduct transactions at minimal prices. This means that businesses need the best API management tools at the minimal prices possible. In addition, the management efforts employed by businesses should suggest ways to reuse code and other resources to minimize the costs of operations.
Conclusion
API management is important in providing visibility into the operations of an API. Every business implementing and adopting the use of APIs needs to make sure that they have proper API management efforts in place. This contributes a lot to the success of the business’ APIs.