You can use centralised API management to maximise the performance of your API ecosystem and enhance visibility, control and security.
What is a centralised API?
Centralised APIs are managed centrally through a platform, with security, governance and other management elements undertaken at the platform level. Organisations implementing management through a centralised platform can reap the benefits of consistent security, design, versioning, documentation, testing and more.
A centralised API structure provides outstanding visibility into the entire API programme through monitoring and analytics, driving better business decision-making.
Types of centralised APIs
You can take a centralised integration approach for any API: REST, SOAP, gRPC, GraphQL and so on. You just need to ensure that the platform you choose works with the types of APIs you have, along with other elements of your architecture.
If you have a microservices architecture, for example, choose an API gateway for microservices with a dashboard through which you can view, manage and monitor everything quickly and efficiently.
Advantages and disadvantages of centralised API
As mentioned above, the advantages of the centralised API approach include greater security, control and visibility. The other benefits of API management when you centralise everything include greater reusability, improved collaboration, easier API discovery, faster time to market and expanded monetisation opportunities. Centralised API management can also make it easier to meet regulatory requirements.
That’s not to say that there are no potential disadvantages. Managing your APIs through a single control point introduces a single point of failure: an issue with your API management platform could disrupt all your API operations. As such, you need to plan your architecture to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Comparison of centralised vs decentralised API architecture
Just as you can take a decentralised or centralised data platform approach, you can choose between a decentralised or centralised API architecture.
With a centralised architecture, you manage everything through a single central platform. This enables you to streamline API design, deployment, security, governance and monitoring across the organisation.
A decentralised architecture gives individual teams greater autonomy to manage their own APIs. This can enable better design and deployment flexibility for each team. However, the lack of standardisation and difficulty in scaling and monitoring decentralised architectures means that many larger businesses find a centralised platform to be a more efficient approach.
Designing a centralised API
A centralised API architecture means you can establish API design standards and best practices that apply to all APIs. This means you can bring consistency to naming conventions, data formats, versioning and more.
API design principles
Good design starts with good API modelling and clarity over what your API needs to achieve and why. That means understanding specific needs, use cases and business and resource requirements. This is true in individual API design and your centralised architecture.
API versioning strategies
A solid versioning strategy is essential for managing a single API product or multiple APIs. How you approach versioning can considerably impact your customer churn rates, so ensure your internal development processes are aligned with a strategic approach that considers customer needs and pain points. Centralising your approach to versioning and applying consistency to it can help smooth the process significantly.
API testing
Centralised API architectures can bring consistency to your testing processes, providing a unified testing interface and integrated testing tools for greater efficiency. Including monitoring and debugging tools in centralised systems can make it easier to identify and troubleshoot problems. Add in the easy automation that comes with centralised integration, and there’s a clear case for centralisation when it comes to testing.
Implementing and managing a centralised API architecture
Implementing a centralised API platform starts with defining your goals. What do you need to achieve and why? With those objectives in mind, you can choose an API management platform that suits your needs. Different platforms have different offerings in terms of scalability, security, developer portal usability, support for standards like OpenAPI and commitment to providing a fully open source API gateway.
Costs can also differ massively, so be sure to find an API management platform that suits your budget now and will continue to do so as you scale, without painful price tier jumps that will hit you in the wallet unexpectedly further down the line.
Look to the future as well – not just your present concerns. How we use, think about and manage APIs is changing, with more of an emphasis on the overall API experience. It’s a concept that is still evolving but will be fundamental to how we plan, build and manage APIs over the coming years. As such, give it some thought when considering how to implement and manage your centralised API architecture.
API security considerations
Centralised API management means you can implement robust, standardised security at the platform level while enabling each API to be developed independently. This freedom within a framework is one of the benefits of Tyk. It means you can give developers the headroom to innovate while enjoying the peace of mind of consistent security and governance.
API performance optimisation
When implementing a centralised API setup, you have the chance to optimise the performance of your APIs. You can centralise your approach to load balancing, caching, content compression, traffic shaping and rate limiting while optimising routing, using connection pooling, offloading authentication and authorisation from backend services and more.
API monitoring and analytics
A centralised approach provides you with oversight of everything, from API usage to performance. This puts you in a powerful position to make decisions on everything from your monetisation strategy to performance improvements. Leading API management platforms will deliver easy integration with API monitoring and analytics tools for full insight.
API troubleshooting and maintenance
The collaborative aspects of a centralised platform mean that you can act fast to troubleshoot and solve issues efficiently. Monitoring and alerts can help you identify bottlenecks and investigate any anomalies.
API documentation
A centralised platform typically includes a repository for API documentation. This means that documentation is more accessible, consistent and up-to-date. It makes documentation version control easier and, with the proper search and navigation functionality, can make it faster for developers to find the information they need.
Where to next?
The Tyk team is always happy to chat about centralised API architectures. Why not get in touch or explore the Tyk blog for more in-depth thoughts on all things API-related?
