Federated API management is an architecture that unifies discovery, security, observability, and governance across every API your organization runs, regardless of which vendor gateway, deployment pattern, or protocol they use. It is the centralized control layer that sits above siloed gateways and lets a platform team govern API estate at scale without forcing every team onto the same runtime. (You may also see it called universal API management or distributed API management.)
Two capabilities define a federated platform. The first is the ability to extend API management across multiple vendor gateways, deployment patterns, and repositories, sometimes known as multi-gateway or any-gateway support. The second is the ability to handle API patterns well beyond SOAP and REST, including GraphQL, Events, Service Mesh, gRPC, and AsyncAPI to list a few.
A truly universal API management platform offers visibility and control over every API in your estate, wherever it runs and whatever form it takes. Axway is recognized as a Leader for API management by analyst firms including Forrester, and the 2024 State of Enterprise API Maturity report found that 78% of enterprise decision-makers do not know how many APIs they have and most enterprises now run 3 to 4 different API management vendors at once. Amplify Fusion is designed for exactly this multi-gateway, multi-broker reality, with a federated control plane that brings every API on every gateway under one governance layer.
In this article, you will learn who benefits from federated API management, how it works under the hood (and why an open agent-based approach beats a proxy-in-the-data-path approach), the trends driving its adoption, and how it compares to centralized and siloed deployment models.
Federated vs centralized vs siloed API management
To see why federated API management is gaining traction, it helps to compare it to the two deployment models it is replacing. Each model trades agility for control in a different way.
| Model | Who manages the API | Best for | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Siloed | Each team runs its own gateway with its own tooling and policy. | Maximum developer agility; teams move at their own pace. | No unified governance, no API discovery, security and compliance drift across teams. |
| Centralized | A platform team runs one shared gateway and enforces policy from the center. | Strong governance, audit trail, consistent security posture. | The central team becomes a bottleneck, every new API has to wait in queue, and acquisitions or partner integrations are hard to absorb. |
| Federated | Teams keep their own gateways and runtimes, while a federated control plane gives the platform team unified discovery, governance, and observability across all of them. | Balances developer agility with enterprise control; supports multi-vendor and hybrid-cloud estates without forced consolidation. | Requires a federated platform (and an agent or control-plane component) capable of speaking to each runtime. |
Most large enterprises end up with a federated model not because they planned it, but because acquisitions, vendor lock-in escape, and team autonomy push them into a multi-gateway reality. Federated API management is the layer that turns that reality from a governance problem into a strategic advantage.
How does federated API management work?
There are several approaches to accomplishing federated API management. Axway’s Amplify Platform uses lightweight, non-obtrusive agents to interface to all of your diverse API data planes (Axway, AWS, Azure, Apigee, Mulesoft …).
The agents do not sit in the data path (unlike the proxy approach used by some vendors which can drive up cost, latency, and deployment time) and allow common discovery, observability, and subscription.
Dive deeper into how Amplify Agents work to bring federated API management to life.
A truly open approach to federated API management means multi-cloud, multi-protocol, and multi-gateway support, which also offers freedom from vendor lock-in.
Multi-gateway and multi-broker support for any-gateway governance
A federated platform that only supports its own gateway is not really federated. The whole point of the approach is to govern APIs running on someone else is infrastructure as well as your own.
This breaks down into two capabilities your federated platform should offer out of the box:
- Multi-gateway support. The platform can discover, secure, and govern APIs running on AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, Apigee, Kong, MuleSoft, Istio, and the platform vendor is own gateway, all from the same control plane. No re-platforming required.
- Multi-broker support. The platform extends the same governance to event APIs running on Kafka, Solace, RabbitMQ, and other streaming brokers. As more enterprises move to event-driven architectures, leaving event APIs ungoverned creates a parallel shadow API problem.
The result is what Axway calls universal API management, and what the market increasingly calls the any-gateway promise. Amplify Fusion implements this through a lightweight, non-obtrusive agent architecture that sits beside each gateway (not in the data path), so latency and deployment cost stay near zero while the central control plane gets full visibility.
What is driving the trend toward federated API management platforms?
API evangelist Kin Lane first talked about an API Economy nearly 13 years ago, but it’s still just as relevant today, if not more so. Every industry stands to benefit from the use of APIs that drive new forms of business; after all, APIs aren’t just for tech companies. But this proliferation and continuous evolution of API technology has ushered in a challenging new era of API complexity.
1. Sprawling business units building their own APIs
Developers need the flexibility and independence to innovate with the tools that work for them. But when business units are developing APIs independently of each other, you start to see silos that lead to fragmented CX, time-consuming management, and automation and standardization headaches.
Arun Dorairajan, Director of Solutions Architecture at Axway, shares what this modern landscape tends to look like in the following clip.
API sprawl can also lead to significant duplication of resources. Two different teams might build the same API without knowing there is already one available that would serve their purposes. We’ve found that companies stand to save nearly $30K on average every time they reuse an API.
2. Multiple API gateways from multiple vendors
The average enterprise these days uses 3-4 different API management vendors, up to 5 in some cases. They often do this for good reason, wishing to differentiate between external vs. internal traffic, or on-premises vs. cloud deployment, or to manage different functionalities.
It becomes a problem when this complexity starts holding a company back.
Not having a universal view of the company’s assets can delay the launch of new digital projects and offerings or make it harder to onboard partners. And then, there are the questions of governance and security.
3. Unmanaged APIs roaming wild
There’s no shortage of colorful terms for these, but whether you call them Zombie APIs or Shadow APIs, unmanaged APIs represent a risk to your organization.
The 2024 State of Enterprise API Maturity report found that 78% of enterprise decision-makers don’t know how many APIs they have. And 74% fully agreed that more than 20% of their organization’s APIs are unmanaged.
If you consider that API attacks cost some $10.6 billion in the U.S. today, a number that’s expected to jump to $198 billion annually by 2030. Unmanaged APIs represent a very expensive security risk for enterprises.
Decision-makers acknowledge they have a problem that’s likely only going to get worse if unaddressed. 87% agree that blind spots such as ‘Zombie’ and ‘Shadow’ APIs are key security threats. Almost all those surveyed (98%) anticipate the number of APIs used by their organization to increase over the next 12 months.
But they are facing significant hurdles when it comes to visibility over their ecosystem.
Without a centralized view, it is harder to discover and secure APIs throughout an organization’s sprawling IT ecosystem. 95% of respondents agreed that a centralized API catalog would improve the governance of APIs. A unified platform allows for better security and compliance with industry standards.
Remediate Your Lost APIs [Zombie APIs, Shadow APIs, Legacy APIs]
What are the benefits of federated API management?
The problem that federated APIM addresses is the complexity of having API development happening all over your organization. Each team has their own tools, technology, and mandates.
A federated API management platform, like Amplify, enables you to:
- Unify all your API assets and manage their lifecycle regardless of pattern, deployment, or platform
- Modernize without having to rip and replace existing API solutions
- Productize APIs for a more business-driven strategy
- Add new API patterns right alongside traditional REST and SOAP
- Monitor, manage, and govern all APIs from one pane of glass
- Drive adoption and monetization from a common API marketplace.
Who needs federated API management?
API platform teams
Master API complexity by operationalizing all your APIs. Get a complete operational view along with usage and performance metrics that increase service delivery at a reduced cost.
API consumers (innovation, digital, and application teams)
Decrease the time to value for APIs that drive digital business. Enable developers to speed delivery of initiatives by easily finding and using proven API products that are security validated, fully documented, and production ready.
Checklist: 5 things producers and consumers need from an API marketplace
Digital business leads
Increase the ROI on your APIs by promoting greater API adoption. Lower the barrier to entry and drive consumption of your digital business initiatives by promoting curated API products, not every single API that you have ever produced.
See also: Understanding the role the API product manager