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API Managmeent market is quite big, makes sense for Amazon to get on board. Imagine this: You are BigCorp USA Inc. and have a bunch of internal SOAP-based web
by jively 11y ago
API Managmeent market is quite big, makes sense for Amazon to get on board.
Imagine this: You are BigCorp USA Inc. and have a bunch of internal SOAP-based web services that are 10 years old and cost a fortune to maintain.
You hear someone will pay you to use them, but SOAP sucks. So you could either go and change your APIs (and probably break a bunch of internal processes) OR you could use a gateway to sit in front of them and translate in bound / outbound requests. Now you can charge people for your APIs!
Scenario 2: If you're an indie dev/ startup but dont want to run EC2 infrastructure, Lambda + Gateway = Cloud service, without any heavy lifting, servers and cost effective. It's development lego. Kind of like Parse.
Scenario 3: You have an API for your app, now you wnat third party devs to use it.Your API is not set up for that kind of access (multi-user security, throttling, quotas, analytics etc.) - solution: shove a gateway in front of it.
- WaxProlix 11y ago#1 is exactly what I'm working on right now; turns out there's a huge market for this sort of thing. We're using an API gateway (Axway/Oracle) to build an "API Mullet" (all SOAP in the back, all REST in the front), and while I have some qualms with the tooling, the idea of an API gateway is very sound.
- junto 11y agoOut of interest SOAP services tend to be message/operation based, while REST is deliberately not this. How do you go about proxying REST style requests to a SOAP backend?
- femto113 11y agoCan't speak for the parent but having tackled similar efforts before I find that almost all APIs regardless of the implementation flavor (including SOAP and RPC) are readily understood as CRUD systems creating/reading/updating/deleting things), and the mapping from CRUD to REST is straightforward. In practice this generally means mapping from a SOAP call like `SetPostAuthor` to a REST call like `PUT /post/:post_id/author`. There are always some gnarly bits along the way, but the basic structure usually comes together pretty easily.
- WaxProlix 11y agoYup, petty much. If you're willing to be a little flexible in your application of RESTful concepts and are okay with your abstractions leaking a bit, it's not especially tough.
- jacques_chester 11y agoThat's the easy case. A harder case is when you have a "service" layer which also has a large collection of queries at various levels of abstraction. These map poorly into resources, where you want a single level of abstraction per resource. And they map badly to legacy consumers, who've grown comfortable to having a collection of special knobs and dials perfectly shaped for their exact needs.
- ch 11y ago"API Mullet" has got to be my favorite description of this type of system. Well done.
- WaxProlix 11y agoI can't take credit for it, alas. It was from an Axway blog post. It's sort of backwards too, if you think about it - business in the back and party in front.
- curiousjorge 11y agodo you have a website?
- WaxProlix 11y agoNot really, why do you ask?
- oblio 11y agoHeh, I never thought I'd meet an Axway product user on HN. What are you using? Gateway? Integrator?
- WaxProlix 11y agoGateway, under oracle branding.
- oblio 11y agoMay God have mercy on your soul :o)
- WaxProlix 11y ago;_;
- sytringy05 11y agome too! (not the oracle version though) :( It does suck a bit, I've also sent Layer 7 into production which is just as bad as Axway. Typical Vendorware. The AWS Gateway is pretty enticing. Solves lots of the API Gateway problem space very quickly and super cheap. We could run our production instance for about $2 a month I reckon, vs a 6 figure sum for the vendor tech.
- Natsu 11y agoJust curious, but why Oracle-branded rather than direct?
- Natsu 11y agoGateway is pretty non-specific if you're talking Axway. It could mean XFB Gateway, Gateway Interchange or API Gateway... and I'm not even sure that's the whole list.
- oblio 11y agoI meant XFB. It was the only product that was referred internally just as "Gateway". "Gateway Interchange" was "Interchange" and "API Gateway" was "API Gateway".
- culo 11y agohave you look at the open source KONG https://github.com/mashape/kong https://github.com/mashape/kong ?
- culo 11y agoAPI management is not big. Is under $500M/year [1] - plus most of the features are becoming commodities. Take a look at the open source KONG API gateway [2] [1]https://www.forrester.com/Sizing+The+Market+For+API+Management+Solutions/fulltext/-/E-res121342 https://www.forrester.com/Sizing+The+Market+For+API+Manageme... [2] https://github.com/mashape/kong https://github.com/mashape/kong
- jively 11y agoAgreed that it's moving down the value chain, many other open source projects out there doing similar things. There's also Tyk Open Source API Gateway (https://tyk.io https://tyk.io) and API Umbrella (http://apiumbrella.io/ http://apiumbrella.io/), and APIAxle, though that's been around for a while now. Also API market is intended to grow to $660 million in US by 2020 and over a billion worldwide (http://blogs.forrester.com/michael_yamnitsky/15-06-07-the_api_management_solutions_market_will_quadruple_by_2020_as_business_goes_digital http://blogs.forrester.com/michael_yamnitsky/15-06-07-the_ap...). So it's definetely not small.
- culo 11y agothere is no real active development on apiaxle and api umbrella is low looking at their pulse.
- culo 11y agoIs small from a VC prospective. Especially in 2015-2020. Everything under 1B is tiny. Plus, when there are soo many players you will end up fighting like crazy just the get bread crumbs.
- curiousjorge 11y agoIn web scraping industry, can confirm.
- curiousjorge 11y agoquick side question, what software market have avoided becoming commoditized?