3rd generation APIs

These few vendors understood that Microservices Architecture wasn't fundamentally different from SOA in terms of its principles. However, in terms of realization, the technologies used to implement microservices truly delivered to the promise of flexibility, scalability, and agility. Therefore, in order to deliver a modern 3^rd generation API platform, they had to build a solution from the ground up with modern requirements in mind.

These vendors acknowledged that a 3^rd generation API platform had to comply with at least the following requirements:

• Implement APIs anywhere (in any vendor's cloud or on-premises) without introducing an operations nightmare and huge costs
• Empower communities of developers by letting them discover and subscribe to APIs via a self-service developer portal
• Deliver seamless tooling for end-to-end API development life cycle and API-first so developers get the tools they need to design, create, and test their APIs
• Give information owners full visibility and control over their information by letting them decide how and by whom their assets are accessed
• Deliver strong security to protect information assets against all major threats (that is, OWASP top 10)
• Is lightweight, appliance-less/ESB-less, and suitable for Microservice Architectures
• Is elastic (that is, can scale easily)
• Is centrally managed regardless of the number of gateways, APIs, and their location
• Makes meaningful use of statistics so operations data can be used to gain business insight and not just to monitor and troubleshoot
• Is subscription-based, with no CPU-based licensing

A recommended reading is 3^rd-Generation API Management: From Proxies to Micro-Gateways, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/soa/weir-3rd-gen-api-mgmt-3787102.html.

This brings us neatly to the Oracle API Platform Cloud Service (Oracle APIP CS) and the goal of this book.

The Oracle APIP CS is a 3^rd generation API platform built from the ground up to satisfy digital requirements and therefore is capable of meeting modern API demands.

In this book, we will explore the capabilities of the product and take a hypothetical use case (which is underpinned with real-world considerations that the authors have had to address) to demonstrate how the platform can be applied.

We will also show how to set up the product, follow an API-first approach to implement a microservice, manage it with the Oracle APIP CS and subsequently streamline the entire development life cycle with even automated testing.

The book also has a chapter in explaining how customers that have adopted the previous (2^nd gen) Oracle API management solution can migrate to this new platform.