When you do a backup on API Manager, you are backing up the configuration of API Connect and all APIs along with the portal subscriptions and consumers.
As you learned in the previous chapter, your customers love to express their passion for your products. The Developer Portal provides you with that option along with out-of-the-box capabilities for blogs and forums. If you are interested in hearing from your customers, leave the capabilities enabled. If you don’t desire them, you have the option to disable them.
The world is at your fingertips with the Developer Portal. With the help of a Drupal developer, you can customize the look and feel; and with API Connect’s built-in capabilities, you can build a fantastic portal. Make sure you take full advantage of it:
Figure 2.8 – Portal admin customization
You have just learned, in depth, about the Developer Portal component of API Connect. Next, you will learn where the APIs are actually executed. The API runtime of API Connect is all handled in the gateway. You’ll learn about that next.
Gateway
The gateway within API Connect is critical for ensuring your APIs are securely executed, highly available, measured, and performant. The gateway in API Connect is called DataPower. DataPower has been an IBM product since 2005 and is considered one of the best gateways on the market. For years, customers have been using DataPower in SOA environments within the DMZ or inside the firewall providing security, routing, transformation, supporting multiple protocols and capturing metrics for analytics. These are all the capabilities that are important to the success of your digital transformation.
Important Note
The gateway runtime is where the rubber meets the road. When defining your API Connect topology, the placement of your API gateway is critical. The API gateway can be associated with the Analytics subsystem in the topology to provide valuable statistics to you and your consumers.
If your APIs are deployed in the cloud, having a gateway within the same cloud will improve performance. You should note that with API Connect, you can place multiple gateways in different clouds, on-premises, or within a hybrid architecture (both the cloud and on-premises). In addition to this, you can configure HA with the gateway and spread them between data centers if you wish.
As you might have gathered, the gateway is very important. Because it can be deployed in heterogeneous environments, it must also support many form factors. The DataPower gateway is available in four different form factors:
- Physical: For example, a hardware appliance with multiple network interfaces and significant CPU/memory.
- Virtual: The same capabilities in the gateway also run as OVA files for VMware.
- Linux: You can install the Linux form factor of DataPower on-premises and/or in cloud environments.
- Docker: DataPower is also containerized and can be part of your API Connect Kubernetes installation. The container version is also useful for testing your APIs when you are using the LTE:
Figure 2.9 – DataPower has four form factors
You can mix and match multiple form factors within your hybrid cloud environment to adhere to your infrastructure needs and corporate standards. Note that cost might also play a role in your decision.
Important Note
Bear in mind that these form factors can be deployed on most common cloud vendors’ cloud infrastructures such as AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, and GCP. The appropriate form factor you pick will depend on the capabilities of the vendor.
So, now that you are aware of the various form factors, you should have a good understanding of how the DataPower gateway can be clustered to provide scale, self-healing, and autonomous gateway management.
DataPower gateway clustering
Gateway clustering is essential to support HA and resiliency. When you add a gateway to the Cloud Manager topology, it is actually referring to a gateway cluster. You can always have a single DataPower gateway within your cluster in non-HA environments, but in general, for all HA environments, you must have a minimum of three DataPower appliances.