By Galvin Deng Hao Khaw & Teh Wee Run
APIs unlock enterprise data, digital consumption, and interaction processes while enabling businesses to share and exchange digital assets beyond conventional applications, websites, and devices. Given that APIs play a major role in traditional practices, they must be managed efficiently.
APIM plays the role of a central point which allows you to keep everything under control. With functionalities like creation, maintenance and monitoring of APIs, you should be able to ensure business continuity of your services and ultimately monetise solutions exposed to your partners.
SAP Integration Suite’s major capabilities include Cloud Integration, API Management, Open Connectors, Integration Advisor and SAP API Business Hub.
SAP Integration Suite connects and contextualises processes and data while enabling new content-rich applications to be assembled faster with less dependence on IT. Pre-built integration packs and existing investments can be composed to deliver new outcomes with less involvement by integration experts.
SAP API Management is a full-lifecycle API platform that can help companies kick-start their enterprise API programs and achieve measurable business outcomes with a clear API strategy in a short time span. SAP API Management is part of SAP’s multi-Cloud digital business platform—SAP Cloud Platform.
Benefits of SAP API Management
Exposing SAP solution as a consumable secured API via SAP API management improved the experience in the integration environment rather than creating a point-to-point solution. SAP Cloud Integration is the application that will consume API published in SAP API Management for the API integration between an external API and SAP.
1.) Developer ecosystem engagement
- API built could be consumed by internal developers and partners to create modern apps in the developer ecosystem via API Business Hub Enterprise.
- Leveraging investment of SAP solution to be an integrated solution to integrate with external API.
API PORTAL: Create APIs, Products, Import Policy Templates, and view Applications here.
The overview page of an API will display how many calls have been made which resulted in a successful response. You can use it to indicate whether there is something wrong with your API policies.
2.) Harmonising secured access to SAP backend API
- Building a well-defined API which create a harmonised layer to access the API consistently.
Policies are applied to an API Proxy to customise its behaviour. These pre-processing steps run on the SAP API Management layer not backend services.
Policies can be broadly classified into the following four categories:-
- Traffic Management Policies – configure cache, control traffic quotas and spikes, set concurrent rate limits
- Mediation Policies – perform message transformation, parsing, validation and raise faults and alerts
- Security Policies – controls the security-related aspects for API Proxies
- Custom Policies – provide custom policy functionality and support for features such as service callout, message data collection, and calling Java, JavaScript and created Python behaviour.
- Protecting API against vulnerabilities with secured API policies suspending suspicious applications before entering on-premise servers.
3.) Configuration instead of coding
- Managing APIs consists of applying standard features in the areas of security, traffic management and mediation. This allows simplifying and streamlining the management of APIs centrally to increase agility and enforce central governance easily.
4.) Efficient API Publishing
- Featuring self-service capabilities, searching, documentation, testing and subscription capabilities.
One of the essential aspects of API Management is simplifying API consumption for the Application Developer. This reduces the time and effort of onboarding Developers, allowing for better time-to-market and reduced costs.
The Developer Portal offers you insights into API calls made from your application. Using your application’s API key makes it possible to trace back a single request to one of your applications. It is used to display application-specific analytics on your app’s overview page. Here you can also regenerate your API key in case it leaks accidentally. Keep in mind that you will need to update each instance where your API key is used.
Pre-Packaged Content Packages are created for some of the commonly used integration scenarios. For example, Success Factor, SalesForce, Ariba and etc. They contain integration flows, value mappings, documentation, and so on. By using this content, you can quickly get started with minimal integration developer effort.
Copy the pre-packaged content to your workspace (Design tab), configure it, and deploy it. Here’s a representation of the typical workflow:
5.) Broad analytics
- API Management provides central, technical, and business-driven analytic capabilities; hence monitoring and analytics are even more relevant than before.
This allows you to quickly solve issues for increased user satisfaction and steer your API program for an optimal return on investment in your digitalisation projects.
To understand the various patterns of API consumption and performance, the API Analytics server uses the API’s runtime data to analyse the information. The runtime data is gathered, analysed, and displayed as charts, headers, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
6.) Subscription on the infrastructure of your choice
You can subscribe to the SAP Integration Suite service through the Cloud Foundry environment and host the API Management service on a public infrastructure of your choice. For instance, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
