Are you ready to go beyond the boundaries of traditional API management and embrace the power of federation? Excellent! But first we need to talk about governance. Maintaining effective centralized governance, while reaping the rewards of a federated approach with decentralized control, may seem daunting – but we’ve got you covered. Read on for all you need to know.
What is federated API management?
Federated API management is all about going beyond the confines and capabilities of traditional API management. In short, it empowers you to manage multiple API gateways (including from different vendors), multiple deployment patterns and protocols, and various event brokers and repositories, all under one single management and governance layer.
Federated API management supports you to achieve centralized governance, while still enabling a huge degree of flexibility in terms of gateways, API protocols and more.
This is a key capability in terms of recognizing the complexity of many modern enterprise API solutions. Often, businesses have multiple gateways with multiple vendors, managing everything from legacy SOAP APIs to REST and GraphQL. Many now have async, event-driven APIs in the mix as well, adding another layer of complexity when it comes to governance.
Enterprises need a way to give their disparate teams the ability to manage their APIs and gateways however works best for their specific scenarios. At the same time, they need a governance framework that is broad enough to encompass all these multi-gateway, multi-cloud setups, enabling effective centralized control, security and insights.
Federated API management is the solution. It delivers the benefit of ironing out governance headaches, courtesy of a centralized governance approach, while still affording different business teams the flexibility they need. Individual teams can manage their APIs independently within the wider framework of enterprise-wide standards.
What are the benefits of federated API management?
The headline benefit of federated API management is its ability to iron out governance headaches when you have different teams and business units all working on APIs. They can all use the tools and approaches that work best for their particular use cases, within a centralized governance approach that keeps your business – and your regulators – happy.
Being able to take a unified approach to all your API assets can deliver superior insights while providing the control you need. It means you can introduce new API types and approaches, without having to replace your existing ecosystem.
Federated API management also delivers the benefit of being able to use a common API marketplace. This means you can level up your API monetization strategy by driving adoption more easily.
Centralized API management and governance also support more effective monitoring and observability. With federated API management, you can see deeper into your API ecosystem and look at the whole picture, instead of juggling different sets of data each time you’re trying to make strategic business decisions.
How can you govern your federated API management effectively?
Governing your federated API management effectively is essential if you are to get the best from your APIs. As with traditional API governance, this means focusing on several crucial areas and concepts:
- Consistency
- Security
- Scalability
- Compliance
You’ll need to apply these across different gateways and services, implementing organization-wide standards within which teams are free to innovate at pace using their preferred tools. How? By implementing the following…
Governance policies
Your policies are the cornerstone of effective federated API governance. They can define everything from your API standards to ownership and accountability both locally and globally. Ensure your governance framework encompasses access control, security, compliance, monitoring and analytics, all of which need to align with your compliance obligations.
You can push these global policies out to your distributed API gateways, ensuring consistency and standardization across the business.
Service discovery
Getting the best value from your resources means ensuring they are available to the maximum number of services and teams. You can implement service discover mechanisms to help achieve this, ensuring that each API gateway is aware of which services are available and what their status is.
Centralized security management
Organization-wide security policies mean you can ensure a standardized approach to rate limiting, IP allowlisting, threat detection, data encryption and more. You can easily use OAuth for authentication and authorization, and adopt a zero trust model, if that’s what you require.
Version control
A standardized approach to API versioning is essential when you’ve got a federated environment in which different teams might need to be working with different versions. It’s also important from a backwards compatibility perspective and in terms of managing deprecation effectively.
Automation
You can automate everything from testing tools for quality assurance to the deployment of changes and security checks, in line with your CI/CD processes. This ensures both standardization and speed while still affording teams the flexibility they need to innovate.
Centralized logging and monitoring
You can integrate a logging and monitoring solution across all of your federated services for ultimate visibility. You can then use the insights you glean for everything from faster troubleshooting and the identification of performance bottlenecks to overseeing API health and driving more strategic business decision-making. Build in automated alerting and dynamic responses across your federated APIs as well, to deal with any anomalies or security incidents at lightning speed.
Logging can also be an important part of your compliance journey, ensuring you can see who accessed what data and when. This makes centralized logging doubly important.
Next steps
Taking a structured approach to the governance of your federated APIs will deliver plenty of rewards, as we’ve covered above. But why stop there? If you’re hungry to learn more about governance and federated API management, join us on 25th February 2025 at LEAP 2.0: The API Governance Conference. You can register here to be part of our deep dive into not only federated API management but AI governance, API automation, industry best practices, API security and observability.
