Amplify Platform API Management

Bringing federated API management to life with expanded Amplify Agents

a decorative image with a graphical representation of an API as a hexagon shown on a computer screen

Agents are the secret sauce of Amplify’s universal (or federated) API management capability. They are the reason Amplify platform can offer a central governance plane for all APIs across your organization, providing a single source of truth regarding your digital assets.

What exactly are agents, and how do they work within your API ecosystem to provide that universal overview? And more importantly, what value do they bring compared with other API governance frameworks? Read on for an overview of what agents can do and what’s coming next for Amplify Platform.

What is an agent?

Amplify Agents are lightweight software applications that either run on your data plane host, or are hosted / embedded with the Amplify platform for certain SaaS-native environments.

They connect your existing API data planes, repositories, and platforms back to Amplify’s management plane. They use the target data planes’ existing APIs to perform important functions like:

  • Discovering new elements (Published APIs, Integrations, APIs in dev)
  • Provisioning new subscriptions and security credentials on the target system
  • Providing traceability of API traffic
  • Checking health of the target system

Amplify Platform relies on two types of agents, each with their own unique functions:

Discovery Agents automate the process of finding resources deployed in an environment (for example, OAS 3.0, Async, WSDL, etc.), and sending them to the Amplify platform where they will automatically service in the Service Registry.

After they have been published, consumers can subscribe to use the discovered assets, at which point the agent helps to natively provision this subscription in the Gateway, as well as to manage credentials and quota enforcement.

Traceability Agents collect usage, metrics, and data plane transaction metadata and send them to the Amplify platform for additional insights. In the platform, API consumers and API providers gain visibility into the performance and behavior of the assets discovered in the data plane.

For more details, see Axway documentation on deploying agents with Axway CLI.

Why are agents important?

This approach allows development teams the independence to use whatever infrastructure makes the most sense for their purpose. AWS teams can use the AWS API gateway and Azure can use the Azure gateway… and the list goes on. The value is providing central visibility into all digital assets across the enterprise, without dictating change.

Other vendors’ approaches include placing a proxy gateway in the data path, or require editing of existing policies, slowing API performance and introducing unnecessary points of potential failure.

Since the agent resides on the same infrastructure as the gateway, it minimizes performance impact and simplifies installation for cloud-based gateways. Arun Dorairajan gives us a look at how this works in a recent demo:

 

 

Let’s start with a recap of Amplify Platform’s existing agents:

Edge gateways

  • Axway APIM
  • MuleSoft Anypoint
  • Apigee Edge APIM
  • Software AG

Cloud gateways

  • AWS API Gateway
  • Azure API Gateway
  • Apigee X APIM

Infrastructure

  • Istio
  • Solace

Code repositories

But there’s more. After all, how can you achieve universal API management – from discovery and cataloguing to publishing APIs on a marketplace – if it’s not truly universal?

The Axway vision for universal, or federated, API management is executed through a complete, centralized overview of all your APIs, regardless of where they are – vendor-agnostic, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure…), on-prem, hybrid.

That’s why we are proud to offer the following new agents:

Edge gateways

  • Kong
  • Software AG webMethods

Infrastructure

  • Kafka Cluster
  • Graylog API security

Repositories

  • GitHub
  • GitLab

What’s next for federated API management?

We are targeting extended environment/infrastructure support, API lifecycle management, and mocking integration. This will provide end-to-end visibility from design through deployment, to operational status, versioning and final deprecation.

Don’t see your data plane agent on the list? Don’t worry, we are allowing customer demand to adjust our roadmap. We also have an SDK that makes it easy to build your own agent.

Watch a demo: see how Amplify Platform helps you harness your APIs through a seamless marketplace.

Key Takeaways

  • Amplify Agents serve as the backbone of federated (or universal) API management, offering a centralized governance plane for all APIs across an organization, promoting a single source of truth.
  • These lightweight software applications connect existing API data planes, repositories, and platforms back to the Amplify platform, ensuring universal visibility and traceability of API traffic.
  • The approach of leveraging agents enables development teams to maintain infrastructure independence while still achieving central visibility into all digital assets across the enterprise, without compromising API performance or introducing unnecessary points of failure.