“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” - In this world of disaggregated, cloud native architectures, developers are increasingly adopting micro services to build Complex Systems. APIs play a huge role in creating a sustainable platform and a good API driven micro services design is key to building and scaling these complex systems. Whilst API Management and API Gateways have traditionally been used for north-south communication, Service Meshes and specialised gateways have emerged to handle complexity for East-West communication. The “parts” work, but is the “whole greater than the sum of its parts”? That’s the objective of this talk. We apply method to madness, and take a critical look at the role of APIs in cloud native, service mesh driven complex system design. We will look at how various API technologies including full lifecycle API Management, API Gateways and Micro-gateways, API Proxies and frameworks to build on-the-fly gateways play with Service Meshes like Istio and LinkerD, proxies like Envoy and ingress gateways. We will also look at practical examples of how full lifecycle API Management play an important role in Service Mesh based K8S Infrastructure.

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API Management in a Cloud Native,
Service Mesh era
Mifan Careem
Vice President, Solution Architecture
mifan@wso2.com | @mifanc | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mifan/
INTEGRATION

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The death of API
Management as we
know it?

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❏ Decoupling applications from the infrastructure layer
can reduce costs, increase security and enable
innovation
❏ Container technology like K8S de-couples applications
from the compute fabric
❏ External APIs help decouple from external consumers
and producers
❏ Internal APIs help decouple from internal consumers
and producers
❏ Decoupling of apps into microservices
Application De-coupling leads to modernization

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❏ API Gateways are the runtime
Policy Enforcement Point of
API Management
❏ There is often a requirement to
de-couple the Management
and Runtime parts
❏ WSO2 Microgateway, Zuul
❏ Frameworks like Ballerina
API Gateway (Pattern)

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❏ API Management often
involves more than just
implementing the Gateway
Pattern for services
❏ Features such as
❏ Managed APIs
❏ Rate limiting and throttling
❏ Monetization and Billing
❏ Analytics and Insights
❏ Developer ecosystem and
marketplace
❏ API Documentation and SDKs
❏ API lifecycle management
❏ API grouping/packaging
API Gateway != API Management

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❏ Gateway acts as an
entry point to the
cluster
❏ Often decentralised,
operated by the
platform team
❏ Envoy, K8S HA
Proxy..
Cluster Ingress

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❏ Relieve developers from
doing the basic,
repetitive application
reliability work in a
distributed environment
❏ Resiliency, observability,
security, routing,
application networking,
insights etc.
❏ Istio, LinkerD, ...
Service mesh as a solution for microservices
communication challenges

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“When you’re a
hammer,
everything you
look at is a nail”

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Separation of
concerns

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❏ API Gateways that
operate and scale
independently
❏ Microservices fronted by
Microgateways
❏ Private Jet, Sidecar
or Shared
❏ Self contained tokens
❏ Stateless, horizontally
scalable, immutable
❏ API developer portal
❏ Full lifecycle API Mgt.
capabilities
Pattern - Cloud Native API Management with
WSO2 Microgateway

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❏ Data Plane
and Control
Plane from
Istio,
Management
Plane from
WSO2
Pattern - Envoy Proxy and WSO2 API
Management with Istio

14. ● Composable enterprise
built as cells
● Cells support ingress
via gateways and
egress direct
● Different types of cells
using heterogeneous
gateways
Gateway for APIs, Events, Streams..

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The death of API
Management as we
know it?

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The death of API
Management as we
know it?
Not really. Not
unless your systems
can’t adapt!

17. It is not the strongest of the species
that survives, nor the most intelligent
that survives. It is the one that is
the most adaptable to change“
THANK YOU “

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