Book Image

Digital Transformation and Modernization with IBM API Connect

By : Bryon Kataoka, James Brennan, Ashish Aggarwal
Book Image

Digital Transformation and Modernization with IBM API Connect

By: Bryon Kataoka, James Brennan, Ashish Aggarwal

Overview of this book

IBM API Connect enables organizations to drive digital innovation using its scalable and robust API management capabilities across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. With API Connect's security, flexibility, and high performance, you'll be able to meet the needs of your enterprise and clients by extending your API footprint. This book provides a complete roadmap to create, manage, govern, and publish your APIs. You'll start by learning about API Connect components, such as API managers, developer portals, gateways, and analytics subsystems, as well as the management capabilities provided by CLI commands. You’ll then develop APIs using OpenAPI and discover how you can enhance them with logic policies. The book shows you how to modernize SOAP and FHIR REST services as secure APIs with authentication, OAuth2/OpenID, and JWT, and demonstrates how API Connect provides safeguards for GraphQL APIs as well as published APIs that are easy to discover and well documented. As you advance, the book guides you in generating unit tests that supplement DevOps pipelines using Git and Jenkins for improved agility, and concludes with best practices for implementing API governance and customizing API Connect components. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to transform your business by speeding up the time-to-market of your products and increase the ROI for your enterprise.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Digital Transformation and API Connect
5
Section 2: Agility in Development
15
Section 3: DevOps Pipelines and What's Next

Managing versions

API development is typically not a set it and forget it type of process. As bugs are discovered and new features are introduced to your APIs, you will need to roll out a new version of them. Since you are likely dealing with many consumers of your APIs, both internally and externally, you would not expect them to just adopt this new version as soon as you roll it out. Of course, each consumer will have their own quality assurance process and timeline so you will need to leave prior versions accessible for each consumer until they adopt the most current one. Also, some versions may have a direct impact on consumers, such as an interface change, which would require them to make a change to adopt this new version, while other versions may only be an implementation change where the consumers are not directly impacted.

Understanding that changes to your APIs are likely and versioning them is critical, we must realize that a consumer does not subscribe to an API itself...