This blog post summarizes a session from LEAP 2.0: The API governance conference, featuring key takeaways and insights. Explore the full on-demand videos, slides, and more here.
As enterprises face a wave of automation at an unprecedented scale, transforming your API landscape to be futureproof has never been more important. But how do you balance the required agility with the need for robust governance? Doing so was a key area of discussion at the recent LEAP 2.0 API governance conference, when industry experts came together to look at API governance from all angles.
One fascinating presentation focused on the role of federated API management in balancing governance and agility. When we asked the 700+ registrants for LEAP 2.0 what was important to them, AI governance came out on top, closely followed by federated API management. Below, we’ve pulled together the top takeaways from this session, presented by Daniel Kocot, Head of API Consulting at codecentric AG and a specialist in understanding APIs as digital products and thinking of them strategically.
Read on to discover:
- The value of federated API management
- How you can implement consistent governance without stifling agility
- The benefits of decentralization
- How to implement federation in a way that aligns with business values and underpins success
The importance of federation in modern API management
Modern API management isn’t about just finding a tool that works easily out of the box. It’s about understanding what an organization really needs and what will add value. That means understanding federated API management.
Normally, when we look at API management, it’s really centralized. Federation is more about decentralization – about having gateways independently across different environments. There isn’t one single solution to this – you have to understand where the need for gateway or proxies comes from and have multiple environments with cross-platform integration. That could mean multiple cloud vendors, hybrid models, different regions and more.
This makes interoperability a crucial consideration. You have to make diverse systems work together, including applying policies, security and standards consistently, all while delivering a system that’s easy to scale. Federation can achieve all of this, even as API ecosystems become increasingly complex.
The importance of agility
Having a control plane that handles every API gateway and/or proxy in your organization is certainly convenient. But flexibility and agility are crucial in enabling rapid change and adaptability. Security is also essential, with some aspects of your ecosystem requiring more security than others. This makes a centralized solution quite hard.
This is where federation comes in to decentralize governance. It delivers local autonomy within a global framework while also supporting better scalability and optimization for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It means you can tailor and customize things more, looking at a whole universe of solutions instead of just one.
Centralization versus federation
A centralized gateway approach works for some businesses, particularly those with smaller and less complex environments. However, when it comes to global enterprises working with multi-cloud environments, you have to look at the federated approach. But for federation to work, you need a few key elements, namely:
- Discovery: Ensuring that APIs can be consistently discovered and registered across multiple federated environments.
- Policy enforcement: Ensuring that policies governing API usage are applied consistently, maintaining control while supporting decentralization.
- Security enforcement: Maintaining consistent, robust security protocols, ensuring safe and secure API interactions across federated domains.
On paper, this looks easy, but the reality can be totally different. Many organizations struggle with inconsistent discovery of APIs and data, while also not enforcing policies or security consistently.
A specification framework can come to the rescue here. It’s a way to set standardized rules and guidelines that govern how APIs are discovered, registered, managed and secured in a federated environment. It blends a universal approach with a common language for terminology. The standardized framework can deliver consistency across all environments, providing scalability and improving security through easy interoperability and streamlined governance.
Why is federation important?
Federation is becoming increasingly important due to the growing complexity of APIs and distributed ecosystems. Christian Posto was talking on LinkedIn last year about omni-directional API management, pointing out that every API provider is also (or can be) a consumer. This is leading to ever-greater complexity.
Having a framework means it’s easier to maintain order across these complex systems while also meeting demands for agility and speed. After all, everybody wants to get to market first.
This is where “API thinking” comes in. API thinking is about writing things down and making them visible – about embracing design, capabilities and ops cycles to build APIs with a design-focused mindset.
Prior to this design focus, it’s important to understand the API’s business alignment and value proposition. Because, while APIs are mostly technical, they are also products in their own right, meaning they need associated business models, stakeholder collaboration, user-centricity and more.
With an API business model, you can identify needs, define segments, clarify value and outline resources. The value proposition then supports you to profile consumers, map solutions and prioritize features. The result is an API product that solves consumers’ pain points and meets users’ needs, all while aligning strategically with business goals. This scalable value delivery also makes it easy to maintain consistency across federated environments, supporting enhanced collaboration and cutting out the gap between the business and its technical teams.
Turning theory into practice
Implementing this approach is all about having a bridge from theory to practice while minimizing risk and underpinning business success.
The first step to implementation is assessing the current API ecosystem – inventorying existing APIs, evaluating current tooling and identifying gaps. Next, you have to define and design the specification framework, clarifying objectives, detailing standardized processes and enforcing policies. Then you can layer API thinking with the ops cycles approach over this, to embed strategic thinking, automate processes for streamlined design, deployment and management, and align value with delivering consumer-centric APIs.
The next implementation stage is deploying everything in the specification framework. A pilot approach, starting with selected APIs to validate the framework, is always a good idea. You’ll also need to rollout stakeholder training, to ensure everyone is upskilled appropriately and understands the framework and its concepts.
Finally, it’s crucial to ensure that APIs align with organizational goals and market needs. This means monitoring business success by tracking impact, gathering insights and using that data to evolve your strategies and iterate your APIs.
Remember that you’ll have to iterate and update your frameworks, as well. Business priorities and market trends will change over time – often rapidly. So, your approach will need to change too.
Embracing the challenges
Using federated API management to balance governance and agility is not without its challenges. Let’s look at a few of these, along with some solutions.
| Challenge | Solution |
| Resistance to change | Engage stakeholders early: talk, ask, refine and then talk some more |
| Integration complexity | Invest in training, support and robust tools, so everyone has the knowledge and tooling they need |
| Maintaining compliance | Automate compliance checks and ensure your APIs align with regulations |
When you implement strategically, monitor continuously and align objectives, you can overcome these challenges and ensure the frameworks you implement support your business goals and empower you to scale. If something you’re using isn’t supporting those goals or isn’t delivering the scalability you need, leave it and align on something new.
The future of federation
One important point to remember is that we are still at the start of federated API management. The adoption of decentralized architectures is growing, at the same time as API specification standards are evolving and security protocols are advancing. Then, of course, there is federation beyond APIs; you can expand federation to data.
All of this means that federated API management isn’t just a technical challenge – it’s a strategic opportunity. If you’re ready to explore how it could benefit your business, it’s time to start working on a specification framework to see how federated API management could work in the context of your enterprise.
Why not speak to the Tyk team to find out more?
