Flexibility and control are both essential when it comes to managing your APIs effectively. Yet sometimes the two can seem to butt heads. Overly prescriptive governance frameworks can stifle flexibility and dull innovation, while ultra-flexible development practices can lead to a lack of standardized control, with resulting security flaws.
How, then, do you achieve the ideal balance between API management flexibility and control? Read on to find out!
Why you need to manage your APIs flexibly
Flexible API management is all about letting individual developers and disparate teams work with the flows and tooling that suit them best. Doing so means that teams can use their preferred tools and methods, which underpins efficiency and productivity – as well as increased developer happiness.
API management flexibility also provides scope for different teams to use their preferred tools while working on different versions of an API – all without tripping over each other or holding each other up.
This delivers benefits at an organizational level, with happy, productive developers innovating at pace and getting to market faster.
However, control over your API management approach is also key…
Why you need control
Maintaining tight control over your API management means you can standardize your approach to security and governance, keeping data safe and regulators happy. It helps you on your compliance journey and is a robust line of defence against security threats and breaches.
Centralized control can also support more reliable API performance, easier troubleshooting and deeper system insights, through everything from policy deployment to observability.
How do you balance flexibility with control?
The short answer is to find the right API management platform – one you can use to apply a robust governance framework that supports consistency and compliance, while also affording your developers the headroom to work productively.
Tyk approaches this by placing flexibility at the core of our ethos. You can deploy our platform flexibly – in the cloud, on premise or as a hybrid implementation – across multiple clouds and with multiple gateways. Our goal isn’t to dictate how you should do things, just to mold around your approach and make it easier for you to get where you’re going.
Embracing open standards is also important. Doing so means developers have the flexibility to design APIs their way, but within a framework of established industry standards and best practices. It means they can work with a wide selection of tools that support them to be more efficient and productive.
Tyk’s open source philosophy and open standards native approach support this. It means you can integrate Tyk seamlessly with a vast range of systems and tooling, for superior flexibility.
The composable nature of the Tyk platform is also key to achieving flexibility, as well as being an important means of avoiding vendor lock-in, as we discussed in this recent blog post.
Finally, a platform that supports collaboration and cross-team communication is important. This makes it easier for teams to share everything from tools to code, ensuring each team can flex, evolve and accelerate based on learnings from across the business.
As we said at the outset, all this flexibility needs to be balanced out with sufficient controls to ensure robust security and governance. That means using an API platform that provides the golden path and guardrails you need, no matter which API protocols you’re using. A universal solution means you can apply centralized control to RESTful APIs, GraphQL and async APIs, enforcing standards globally while your local developer teams can still innovate flexibly and at pace.
Centralized control means being able to apply the policies you need in terms of rate limiting, throttling, load balancing and quota management. It means managing everything from keys to circuit breakers across the API ecosystem. It also means implementing authentication and authorization securely, so that you retain full control of who accesses your services and what they can do.
Another important element of this central control is observability. With the right observability tools, you can log and trace across your entire API infrastructure, driving better decision-making through superior insights and speeding up troubleshooting significantly. It’s why Tyk provides native support for OpenTelemetry – so you can see deeper and achieve more.
The business benefits of balancing control and flexibility
Approaching your API management in a way that achieves both control and flexibility delivers tangible results. You’ll have happy developers who can work with their preferred tools and approach, driving up productivity. You’ll have happy regulators too, with centralized security and governance supporting a smoother compliance journey. This standardized approach to security also provides plenty of peace of mind for everyone from your developers to your senior execs.
Value for money is another benefit. Flexibility and composability in your API management solution mean you can avoid being locked into vendors where costs and complexity tend to spiral over the longer term.
Then there’s the fact that your business benefits from faster time to market. This in itself delivers plenty of wins. You can beat the competition to market with new products and grow your market share as a result. You can also keep your existing customers happy thanks to faster release cycles for new product features and capabilities.
By taking this approach of balancing flexibility and control, you are also laying the foundation for future evolution, which is crucial in the fast-evolving API market.
Where next?
Choosing the right API management solution delivers benefits that extend beyond balancing flexibility with control. If you’re keen to discover more about what those benefits are, this is the place to start.
