Author: George Psistakis

George is co-founder of Apirise, an environment where you can modify the behavior of an API to the context of your application. He is a lousy singer and painter. Project Manager during day and startuper at night. Scrum Master, co-organizer of the local Agile and API Athens meetups and a bit of coder. Juggling his two kids, runner, boardgamer and Tyrion fan.

Categories
Tools

API Management tools: How to find the one for you

Launching an API is hard. You need to make sure your service is reliable, secure and well-documented. This is where API Management tools come into play. They provide the means to expose your API to external developers in an easy and affordable manner. One of the best definitions of API management is the one introduced by APIacademy:

But first, let us know which are YOUR favourite API management tools. Take the Developer Economics Survey and you may win amazing prizes and gear.

api-management

“Creating a centralized API architecture that makes the process of composing, securing and managing high-performance interfaces significantly simpler and more consistent.”

Features of an API Management service

API management services have a multitude of features. Their main focus is to make designing, deploying and managing an API easier, as well as to ensure that it is safe, secure and functional. Some of these tools facilitate integrations, transformations or API orchestrations. Ideally, an API management service should at least cover most of the below basics:

  1. Documentation – Sounds boring, right? Still, one of the most common problems of developers is figuring out how an API works. Development time is too precious to waste in trial and error of an undocumented API. An API management service has to provide an easy way to read the documentation and enable developers to “try before they buy”. In some cases it is even possible to provide interactive documentation. Simplicity and usability are the keys!
  2. Analytics and Statistics – It is critical to understand how people use your API and get insights for your business.
  3. Deployment – Should be flexible and support public or private clouds, on-premises implementations, or combinations.
  4. Developer engagement – Engaging with your API consumers, developer or partners is important. Getting an easily accessible developer portal will significantly facilitate onboarding.
  5. Sandbox environment – This feature will increase both the value of an API and its adoption rate. What better than being able to develop and test your code.
  6. Traffic management and caching abilities.
  7. Security – APIs carry sensitive data, so it is important to protect the exposed information. The service has to at least provide identity and access management for users and developers.
  8. Monetization – Provide the capability to monetize your API.
  9. Availability – Should be available, scalable and redundant. An API environment can become demanding and the service should be able to deal with any kind of errors, problems or temporary traffic spikes.
  10. Support of Legacy systems.

To Proxy or not to Proxy?

The vendors in the API management space provide a number of solutions across the above main categories but that does not mean they support everything. They are implementing their solution in three different ways: Proxies, Agents or Hybrid.

  1. API service providers that use the concept of a Proxy. Their solution “sits” between the customer and their users and the traffic goes through them. Proxies provide caching capabilities and protection of customer’s back-end infrastructure from traffic spikes. The main criticism they receive is that they increase the cost and bring up privacy and latency issues. Apigee, Mashape and Mashery are examples of such implementations.
  2. API service providers that use the concept of agents. Agents are plugins that integrate with your server. They do not get in the way of the API calls like proxies. As a result they do not introduce network latencies or 3rd-party dependencies. On the other side, features like caching are not easy to implement. 3scale is an example of such implementation.
  3. API service providers that use a hybrid approach. This means you may get an agent and a proxy. For example you may want to use a proxy for the caching and the agent for authentication. Companies like Apigee or 3scale we talked before are also moving to hybrid solutions.

13 API management tools

Deciding on an API Management Tool, you are faced with lots of choices. Available solutions may focus in one or two or cover many of the features discussed above and vary greatly in price. There are tools that were acquired by bigger vendors like Intel or CA or Microsoft. Open source tools are also available. Last but not least, some tools are heavy enterprise focused and other much less so.

Name Type License Stackoverflow questions Market segment Strong Points
3scale Agent, Proxy Commercial 15 Startups to Enterprises Wide range of tools
ApiAxle Proxy GPL 9 SMBs to Enterprises
Apigee Proxy Commercial 598 SMBs to Enterprises Powerful Analytics
Axway Proxy Commercial 9 SMBs to Enterprises
CA Layer7 Proxy Commercial 35 Enterprises Advanced support for mobile applications
IBM API Management Agent, Proxy Commercial 17 Enterprises Large Scale, User friendly
Mashape Proxy Commercial 106 Startups to Enterprises Monetization, discoverabilty
Mashery Agent, Proxy Commercial 57 SMBs to Enterprises API strategy services
Microsoft’s Azure API Management Agent, Proxy Commercial 262 Startups to Enterprises
MuleSoft Proxy Commercial 134 Enterprises Based on proven open source technology, programmableweb
Oracle SOA Proxy Commercial 213 Enterprises Large scale, SOA
Akana (formely SOA Software) Proxy Commercial 3 Enterprises
WSO2 Agent, Proxy Apache 4421 Startups to Enterprises Open source

3scale

3Scale is very active on the API management space with a wide range of customers, ranging from startups to enterprises. They provide a hybrid solution to help you deploy, manage, distribute and monitor your API. They offer an on premises API management solution along with cloud based API administration, analytics, reports, developer and partner portal.
More about 3Scale: http://www.3scale.net/api-management/

Mashape

Mashape does not offer an API Management service per se. They provide important features that are part of such services though. You may test an API, generate code, and get a developer portal and user management. Most importantly they provide out-of-the-box monetization, a developer community and discoverability through their API marketplace.
More about Mashape: https://www.mashape.com/

Microsoft’s Azure API Management

Microsoft’s Azure API Management became available to the public rather recently. You can provide and manage an API, get developer portals, documentation, security management, performance management, statistics and analytics. They have on-premises and cloud versions (not limited to the Azure cloud).
More about Azure API Management: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/api-management/

Apigee

Apigee provides a range of services, from free API tools for developers to large API management solutions for enterprises. Their solution can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises. They offer API analytics, developer portal, transformations, traffic and performance management. Apigee seems to provide the richest API analytics platform compared to other companies. In mid-2014, they launched the new version of their big data predictive analytics platform.
More about Apigee: http://apigee.com/

Mashery

Mashery is an Intel company since 2013. They provide an all-around API management solution that supports SaaS and on-premises implementations as well as a few hybrid oriented ones. Their services cover from API technology and infrastructure to business strategy.
More about Mashery: http://www.mashery.com/api-management

CA Layer7

Layer7’s API Management is heavily enterprise directed. They offer on-premises and cloud deployment solutions. Their services range from integration, security management, performance management, mobile API gateways, mobile optimization and developer portals. CA’s support for mobile applications is considered to be more feature reached compared to other solutions.
More about CA: http://www.ca.com/

IBM API Management

IBM’s solution comes either as on-premise or cloud hosted. It covers a lot of the API management needs of a large company and it is considered a much user-friendly platform.
More about IBM API Management: https://apim.ibmcloud.com

Oracle SOA

Oracle provides an API Management solution that consists of its API gateway and SOA suite. The API gateway is used for securing and managing APIs and as a first line of defense in SOA environments.
More about Oracle SOA: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/soa/api-management/overview/index.html

MuleSoft

MuleSoft’s solutions is based on open source technology. They offer easy API design, advanced integration and testing features. It is widely used and they also work a lot with developer communities.
More about Mulesoft: http://www.mulesoft.com/

Akana (formely SOA Software)

They provide a unified Enterprise level API management and SOA Governance solution. It can be implemented on-premises or in the cloud. They offer a horizontal solution from design and building an API to policies, security and lifecycle management.
More about SOA Software: https://www.soa.com/solution/api-management

Axway

They offer an API Gateway that provides everything you need to develop, integrate and manage APIs. They provide security management and of course an API Portal for developers and partners.
More about Axway: http://www.axway.com/en/enterprise-solutions/api-management

WSO2

WSO2 is considered the most complete open source solution today. It covers API integration, management, identity and mobile. It supports public, private clouds, and hybrid implementations. WSO2 follows an open development process, where customers can provide input.
More about WSO2: http://wso2.com/

ApiAxle

It is an open source API management and analytics solution. It is a proxy that sits in front of your API and manages caching, security, performance and traffic. As an open source project, you may contribute to its code base.
More about ApiAxle: http://www.exiconglobal.com/apiaxle/

Epilogue

Not all companies launch API programs and not all API programs have the same goals. Some APIs are used as a revenue model or part of a product or service, others are free. Certain APIs are used to provide access and information to an ecosystem of companies. As the requirements vary, the tools diversify. So choose your API strategy and pickup the right tool.

 

Which are your favourite tools? Let us know and shape the future of developer economics. Take the survey.

Categories
APIs

4 + 2 tools for a happy multi-cloud developer

It is exciting to be a developer these days. You’re the talk of the town and everyone looks for ways to make you happy, competing to create new tools or new services just for you. Developing a great app in such a mesh of services shouldn’t be an issue. Still, this often proves to be a daunting task. Just like the last time you wished to deploy in the cloud and there were 15+ various different services you had to consider.

sdks-de

– OK, so what is the problem? Having many alternatives is good … Right?

Well, that depends…. Here’s an example…
Let’s take the app we just talked about. To develop an app for cloud “X” you will need to download the SDK or Toolkit of that cloud and start writing code to use it. But what happens if you wish to switch to another provider? In case you want to change to cloud “Y”, you will need to download the toolkit for the new cloud. Cloud “Y”’s toolkit in turn has its own structure, syntax and design.

What can you do?
1. Stay on the same cloud…
2. Switch to another cloud. That is: Remove the old cloud code; download the toolkit of the new cloud; understand how it works; learn its particulars and re-design your app around it. Quite complicated, isn’t it?

It is clear that switching to another cloud provider is becoming difficult. Should you stay or should you go? This problem can be solved by two ways: standardization or 3rd party tools.

There are currently two organizations competing to come up with a standard for all cloud providers. These two standards are the CIMI / Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface and the OCCI / Open Cloud Computing Interface. The problem is that neither CIMI or OCCI are very widely used – instead of standardising, providers are increasingly coming up with their own APIs. Which leads to the 3rd party tools solution.

Cloud providers offer REST APIs for their services, but these often differ at the details. Cloud libraries or multi-cloud toolkits try to fix this by offering an abstraction layer over these services, allowing interaction with various cloud providers. They hide away their differences, provide one view and a unified API and eventually make moving between cloud providers easier. With their help, you can avoid getting stuck with one vendor. You only have to download the toolkit and write the code to use its API, which in turn will communicate with the cloud services. To switch to another cloud, you will not need to download another SDK or toolkit. You simply need to write some code (which is what you do anyway) to “talk” to both clouds.

What is out there?
There are several open-source, multi-cloud toolkits that you can use in your projects. Which to select largely depends on your coding language, cloud provider and service you need to work with. There are 4 main types of services supported by these toolkits:

  1. Compute nodes (Start / Stop instances or configure)
  2. Data Volumes (Creating / Attaching / Delete volumes, snapshots etc.)
  3. Load Balancers
  4. DNS

Note that not all providers are supported or willing to hand you over all the above four functionalities. To choose therefore the tool that best fits your needs, you need to do some homework.

To understand why you need to do any homework, let’s consider an example.

Assume you want to deploy and integrate your application and you only have to select between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Which are the best tools for you?

Apache Libcloud – Python

In 2009, Cloudkick created a SaaS cloud monitoring and management platform as a means of “talking” to many different providers. That early version of Cloudkick was later released as an open source Apache project and was finally acquired by Rackspace and replaced by Rackspace Cloud Monitoring.

Libcloud is a library that abstracts the differences between cloud providers. It allows you to manage different cloud resources through a unified and easy API. It is an open source project with a single Python interface of 35+ cloud providers and their services. Below is a list of the features and supported providers:

SERVICE AWS Azure
Compute 40+ YES
Block Storage 17+ YES
Cloud Object Storage 8+ YES YES
CDN 6+
Load Balancers as a Service 7+ YES
DNS 6+ YES

Libcloud is the de facto choice for devs into Python and is supported by a great community. The documentation on their website is pretty good.

Let’s see some community stats:

  • Stackoverflow questions: 160
  • Github repositories 176
  • Most Github Stars (on single project) 518
  • Github Code results 2.2M
  • Google search (name + “libcloud”) 80K

Notice that Libcloud does not fully support Azure. For the time being it only supports Azure Blob Storages plus many of the AWS methods.

More about Libcloud at:

Note 1: If you exclusively work with AWS you may want to check Boto < https://github.com/boto/boto>. It is a Python library for interacting with AWS APIs which allows you to build tools in Python, change and manage your AWS resources.
The project is led by an Amazon Engineer.

Note 2: If you feel adventurous, take a look at Libcloud REST, a Google Summer of Code 2012project which exposes most of the Libcloud functionality over HTTP.

Apache Jclouds – Java, Clojure

Jclouds, now one of the most popular solutions, started off as a project from Adrian Cole who later joined the Apache incubator. Adrian Cole is considered an active community leader in the cloud interoperability, REST and DevOps space. His current title is “cloud guy” at Twitter. Jclouds is an open source library that allows you to use portable abstractions or cloud-specific features and supports Java and Clojure.

Let’s see what kind of cloud resources Jclouds can manage:

SERVICE AWS Azure
Compute 17+ YES
Block Storage 7+ YES YES
Cloud Object Storage
CDN
Load Balancers as a Service 2+ YES
DNS

Jclouds, being a Java toolkit, naturally relies on a great community to support it. They also have excellent documentation on their website.

Here are the community statistics:

  • Stackoverflow questions 26
  • Github repositories 52
  • Most Github Stars (on single project) 531
  • Github Code results 7K
  • Google search (name + “jclouds”) 33K

While Jclouds supports some of the AWS services, it does very little on the Microsoft Azure side. In fact, it does not go beyond Azure Blob.

Note: There seem to be some early Azure implementations in the Jclouds labs. If interested, take a look or even contribute to their project.

More about Jclouds at:

Fog – Ruby

Wesley Beary, currently working at Heroku, is a great Rubist and the creator of Fog back when he was at Engine Yard. Fog is a cloud provider agnostic toolkit, therefore it supports a variety of cloud providers. The Fog gem is the most popular cloud SDK in the Ruby world and it is heavily used with over 4M downloads and a large and active community contributing to its development. It is an MIT-licensed open-source community project and is also used as basis for other Ruby gems like Chef.

SERVICE AWS Azure
Compute 25+ YES
Block Storage 9+ YES
Cloud Object Storage
CDN
Load Balancers as a Service 2+ YES
DNS 10+ YES

You can find many tutorials about Fog and its implementation online and adequate documentation on their website.

  • Stackoverflow questions 279
  • Github repositories 188
  • Most Github Stars (on single project) 3230
  • Github Code results 305K
  • Google search (name + “fog”) 565K

While currently Fog supports some of the major AWS services, it supports nothing on Azure! There are various discussions around the net about whether Fog will eventually go that way but, for the time being, no ongoing relative efforts exist other than some sparse GitHub repositories. Thus, if you are a Rubist and Azure user, the official SDK is a one-way option.

More about Fog at:

Apache deltacloud

RedHat wanted to develop an open cloud, vendor neutral so they started Deltacloud in 2009 and later joined the Apache incubator. For all you Rubists outhere, Deltacloud was written in Sinatra.

While Deltacloud is not the only open source project to offer cloud abstraction, it has a remarkable difference: Libcloud and Python, Jclouds and Java, Fog and Ruby are programming language-specific libraries. Deltacloud on the other hand is independent of the programming language and can also be used as web service. It provides three different APIs for interacting with Cloud service providers (a RESTful API, a CIMI-compliant API and a proprietary API) and is backward compatible across different versions of support cloud platforms.
Let’s see what kind of cloud resources and providers it supports:

SERVICE AWS Azure
Compute 15+ YES
Block Storage 15+ YES YES
Cloud Object Storage
CDN
Load Balancers as a Service
DNS

Apache Deltacloud has an active community of programmers who constantly update it. You may find adequate info both in their website and online to get you started.

  • Stackoverflow questions 10
  • Github repositories 37
  • Most Github Stars (on single project) 80
  • Github Code results 34K
  • Google search (name + “deltacloud”) 23K

More about Deltacloud at:

…and 2 bonus tools

1) Do you like to play with node.js? Check pkgcloud! It is a standard library for node.js that abstracts away the differences among multiple cloud providers. It supports the usual Cloud resources and providers. Interestingly, it supports Azure Compute resources which is not the case in any of the above toolkits.

2) If you are the Erlang type of dev take a look at elibloud. An Erlang wrapper around Libcloud.

Community Statistics Comparison

Below you will find two charts: a comparison of the number of cloud providers supported by each of the above toolkits and some community statistics.

cloud-providers
community-statistics-comparison

Conclusion

Since 2006 the number of cloud providers has been steadily growing, bringing more services in the game. This is good news for developers, as more options become available to choose from. Using tools that provide a single interface to work with all these services can prove of great value to you, facilitating a potential transition from one provider to another. Still, good research prior to choosing a toolkit is essential. In our example, it becomes clear that Azure support from the toolkits presented is problematic, which is not the case for AWS (there could be many reasons for that, some originating in the very nature and definition of the Azure API). It seems that the development of toolkits is still a work in progress and things will soon start moving. Support of all major cloud providers is only a matter of time – and a game changer!

Do you use any kind of multi-cloud toolkits?

Categories
Tools

Agile tools for the Samurai Coder

This post is not meant to help you understand agile methodologies. A simple Google search will be enough to reveal tons of posts presenting, explaining, analyzing and suggesting how to make agile methodologies work to your advantage. And we have to keep in mind that they all usually apply to teams of 3 or more people. This post is about the freelance developer who just needs a simple way to manage tasks and projects. I do not claim that I present the absolute and irrefutable Truth; every person has their own way of working. This post simply intents to be a starting point to another way of doing things.

Meet Sally. Sally is a developer, a Samurai Coder, a hero of the day and she absolutely loves writing code. She works as a freelancer and the other day she got a new project from a customer.

Before starting work, she picks up a piece of paper. She writes down the day’s tasks (to-do’s, appointments, ideas etc) and crosses off the completed ones. She repeats the same process every day. These sheets of paper pile up and follow her everywhere… until she finds Evernote. Evernote replaces the paper and uploads her notes to the cloud, but still…. The notes multiply just as much and just as quickly as the papers do. They only stop creating piles on her desk.

Sally is desperately in need of solution – a way to capture and track her customer’s numerous requests as well as the 100+ things she has to do. What about a bit of agility and organization? How about combining simple methods and tools to get things done? Sally gave it a thought and found out the 5 most important things to her:

  1. Ability to separate projects and tasks.
  2. Clean visual overview, i.e. understand what needs to be done, watch the progress or the big picture, and prioritize accordingly.
  3. Sharing and Collaboration features.
  4. Accessibility, i.e. ability to retreat her work through any device in real time.
  5. Speed, i.e. Sally’s work is programming, not using tools. Tools should work for her, helping her save time, and not the other way around.

The simple process

  1. Here’s a really simple and basic five step-process that Sally could follow. This kind of flow is Kanban-like (but I will talk more about Kanban on another post).
  2. Create a repository for every project.
  3. Separate it virtually in 3 areas: to “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done”.
  4. Add new tasks, requests or bugs in the “To Do” area.
  5. While working on a task, move it from “To Do” to “Doing”.
  6. Move the task to “Done” when completed.

image00

The tools

There is a great variety of software tools in the web; tools for small teams, big teams, distributed teams… But how about one single person? We will see how Sally can follow this process with the use of 3 simple tools: a) Trello, b) Asana and c) Wunderlist

a) Trello

Trello’s visual layout is very intuitive. Imagine a dynamic whiteboard with columns (lists) and cards (like advanced sticky notes).
How to use it:

  1. Create Project with the use of Trello Boards: Each Trello board represents a project. Add lists (columns) to simulate progress. Add cards as tasks. And that’s all…
  2. Managing Tasks: A new Board has by default three basic columns: “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done”. You can drag a card over these columns anyway you like and you can always visually track both the card and its status.
  3. Handling of requests or bugs: Trello has a color mapping that you can apply on the cards (e.g. red color for bugs). You may add lists, comments and much more.

image01

b) Asana

Asana is an advanced task list oriented application with an equally intuitive visual layout to Trello. It is fast, easy to use and quite popular.
How to use it:

  1. Create Project with the use of Asana Projects: Start a new project and add tasks in the center column.
  2. Managing Tasks: Tasks added in the center column get a level of hierarchy and may be stacked. You can start by creating the three high level tasks “To Do”, “Doing” and “Done” and then fill them with specific tasks accordingly. You can easily create a task, drag it to move and edit its details on your right hand side (add sub lists, comments and more). There is a checkbox in front of every task and may be checked if the task is completed. By doing so the task is removed from sight but if you prefer you can manually drag it bellow “Done”.

image02

c) Wunderlist

Wunderlist is a pure task list oriented application, though their newest update has many improvements including Collaboration and Public Lists. It has a clean UI and is much simpler than Asana, quite fast and user friendly.
How to use it:

  1. Create Project with the use of Lists. Add a new list and add tasks in the main column. Just like a true boss…
  2. Managing Tasks: Add tasks in one column. In order to create some kind of flow for your tasks, create more lists (see the example in the pic below). Wunderlist is quite easy to use, but not as advanced as other tools, i.e. missing collaboration features, ability to assign subtasks, etc.

image03

All of the above tools are equally fast, have the ability to collaborate (add more people to your list/project) and can sync to other available devices.

Quick Verdict:

Trello

 

+ Nice visual and collaboration.

 

– No task sub lists (there is a great checklist feature, but there is a minor problem: you cannot assign tasks to these lists. As a result you need to create separate cards).

 

– The visual style with the cards may overcrowd the board making it look messy.

 

Asana

 

+ Nice interface, quick.

 

– Not a nice “big picture” or “flow” visibility

 

Wunderlist

 

+ Nice simplistic UI, powerful task list.

 

– Missing advanced features the other tools offer.

 

+ Their recent update added collaboration features.

 

Sally in our story has therefore many great tools in her disposal. All she has to do is put her pen and paper aside and work easier and faster. And you can all join her!