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

Applying standards to your API environment

Up to now, we have discussed the governance process for organizing and managing your API lifecycle, including roles and permissions, approvals, and environment setup. These are all critical to the governance process, but they are mostly enforced by the initial configuration of your API Connect environment. That is, once you decide on how to implement these, and configure your installation appropriately, the restrictions put in place will enforce the rules. As you know, your API factory is a living and ever-changing cycle. Over time, you will be creating new APIs and changing existing ones. As this happens, there are certain aspects of the configuration that are not as easily controlled. These are the standards that should be established, monitored, and enforced to make your API organization a success.

As we have mentioned before, API creation is very different from our old application development where we could just develop some code or...