Introducing Red Hat OpenShift API Management

For a modern approach to building applications, Kubernetes is only the beginning. Red Hat has turned Red Hat OpenShift into the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform by giving organizations the hybrid cloud platform they need to build and deploy powerful applications. To build on that, we're providing Red Hat OpenShift API Management, a service for Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS that will help speed up time-to-value and reduce the costs of delivering API-first, microservices-based applications.

Part of Red Hat’s portfolio of managed cloud services, Red Hat OpenShift API Management is about making it easy to focus on application development and deployment, and not on standing up API infrastructure. While an API management service can provide value for your business, its infrastructure is not where your development or operations teams should be (or want to be) focusing their efforts.

What is Red Hat OpenShift API Management? 

OpenShift API Management is hosted and managed services based on Red Hat 3scale API Management, with Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO) built in, running as an add-on for OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. It gives organizations the option of API management for large-scale deployments, without having to run the API management solution themselves.

OpenShift API Management is a fully Red Hat managed API traffic control and API program management solution that includes analytics, access control, developer workflows and more. It's a great option for organizations that have worked with the 3scale.net SaaS offering but are looking to expand to large-scale deployments.

Red Hat will provide upgrades, updates and infrastructure, as well as uptime guarantees for your API services. Your teams can spend their time developing and improving applications that matter to the business rather than babysitting the API Management infrastructure.

Benefits of Red Hat OpenShift API Management

OpenShift API Management provides the services you need to successfully provide API-first, microservices-based applications. The top-level components are the API Manager, API Gateway (APIcast) and Red Hat SSO. 

Developers can use OpenShift API Management to define APIs or consume APIs already available, publish their APIs for use by other developers and partners, and deploy the APIs into production. 

API analytics

Once in production, OpenShift API Management helps to monitor and provide insight into the use of the APIs. It will help you understand if your APIs are being used, how they're being used, what demand looks like -- and even whether the APIs are being abused. Knowing how your API is used is crucial to help manage traffic, anticipate provisioning needs and understanding how your applications and APIs are used.

Again, all of this right at your fingertips without having to dedicate personnel to standing up or managing the service.

Single Sign-On

The addition of Red Hat SSO means that organizations can opt to use their own system (which requires custom code) or use Red Hat SSO included with OpenShift API Management. (Note that the provided SSO instance is solely for use with API management, not meant as a standalone SSO solution.)

Developers don't need custom code to glue identity management into API access, it's right there and ready to use. Organizations can retain a single authority for user identity and authorization, rather than putting an additional burden on application developers.

Part of the OpenShift platform

All of these services are tightly coupled with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service for AWS, which confer a number of significant benefits for all of the teams responsible for your organization's applications.

The underlying service is managed by Red Hat just like the rest of OpenShift's managed services. This can help your organization reduce the cost of operations while speeding up the building, deploying and scaling your cloud-native applications in open hybrid cloud environments.

Streamlined developer experience

Developers get the benefit of having the features and convenience of 3scale API management built into their platform. They can more easily prototype APIs before they are exposed to internal and external consumers, and then publish them to be used as part of applications and services.

It also provides all the features and benefits that come from using a Kubernetes-based container platform. Reduce time-to-market with ready-to-use development environments, and help achieve operational efficiency by providing automatic scaling and load balancing.

Figure 1: OpenShift API Management illustrated

Want to make use of the APIs exposed by OpenShift API Management? As long as there's a public route to the OpenShift Dedicated cluster's APIcast API Gateway from your internal apps or those hosted elsewhere, no problem.

To learn more about Red Hat OpenShift API Management, visit Red Hat OpenShift API Management, you can also watch the replay of our webinar from January about building API-first applications.