You are cleared for takeoff with AMPLIFY Central: Your API Traffic Control Tower

APIs are the lifeblood of software development today, allowing information to be shared at lightning speeds between hundreds of different entities.

This allows for rapid growth and less time to market. However, managing this API traffic can be overwhelming and time-consuming causing any efficiency gains to be lost to this often-chaotic task. What doesn’t seem like a business-critical gap today can become a major runway traffic jam tomorrow, hindering organizations from developing exceptional digital services.

The inability to have clear visibility and control of your API traffic flow is much like trying to fly a plane without the direction of air traffic control. While the pilot is not able to see where the other planes are flying in proximity to them or if there may be debris on the runway, the air traffic controller in the control tower can see the full picture of all planes, weather conditions, and possible danger zones.

API Traffic Control Tower

Managing the air traffic from all directions and the constant landing and takeoffs on the ground is no easy task. The same can be said about directing API traffic, it requires the same type of control tower capabilities to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Axway’s AMPLIFY™ Central delivers this via two key agents that allow both discovery and traceability of APIs through the AWS API Gateway. The discovery agent lets you discover new deployments and also stage updates to existing deployments, while traceability enables you to quickly identify any bottlenecks or errors within your traffic flow.

AMPLIFY Central

Axway’s AMPLIFY Central gives enterprises control tower capability for API traffic. Controlling API traffic for both service-to-service calls (east to west flow) and consumer-to-service calls (north to south flow), as well as data movement across multiple regions, gateways and containers is a mission-critical business initiative that Axway delivers.

AMPLIFY Central is a hybrid multi-cloud environment management system with a Unified Catalog that provides visibility and control for all the APIs within an organization, no matter where they may be originating or landing from.

Just like an airline control tower, AMPLIFY Central gives a bird’s-eye view of all API traffic, whether it is on the ground (on-premises) or up in the sky (in the cloud) and assigns the right policies to APIs in flight.

Commanding air traffic with AMPLIFY Central

IT teams today must guide their organizations through a minefield of new challenges ranging from managing complex mesh app service architectures to ensuring data security and compliance across multiple regions for all APIs available within an organization.

APIs and edge gateways you used to connect services act as the planes and air space that the AMPLIFY Central control tower manages from one centralized view.

Axway policy controls allow you to control authentication, quota and rate-limiting policies in addition to existing support for front end JWT, back end basic auth, and front-end API key and secret. Giving an organization full control of their traffic flow.

Axway’s industry-leading API Management platform, API Manager, can also be used to publish services from your environments to AMPLIFY Central’s Unified Catalog for control and consumption. This provides the capability to house multiple API Managers across testing, staging, and production environments using Axway SaaS Gateway or AMPLIFY Mesh Governance.

With Mesh Governance, you can register multiple environments, clusters, and regions to see all the services running in the mesh, enabling complete application integration. Through the edge gateway, you can view your “north-south” API traffic and view each individual API transaction and still have a consolidated view and one-stop destination for IT teams to work out of. 

Imagine trying to control air traffic from multiple different airports at one time, not being able to see exactly what planes are taking off and landing, not to mention what the runway activity is for each airport while being responsible for everyone’s safe and positive flying experience.

This is the current reality for most organizations’ IT right now. They are responsible for managing the APIs on disparate platforms with no ability to have real-time insight in a consolidated view, resulting in inefficiency and missed opportunities.

With Axway, you don’t have to limit your APIs to a certain Gateway or “airport” to gain a consolidated management advantage. Through AMPLIFY Central you can publish APIs from any API Gateway as defined by company policy. Those APIs can then be published into the Unified Catalog.

Always evolving our capabilities is our API Management superpower. Soon we will be able to link up to disparate environments to view services running within each individual manager environment, allowing them to be available for publishing and consumption within AMPLIFY Central’s unified API Catalog. We will be expanding details soon on when this will be taking off!

Letting AMPLIFY Central do all the heavy lifting allows organizations to work smarter, not harder when driving business value. Axway provides a consistent way to manage policies and control billions of API calls, no matter if their projected flight path is east-to-west or north-to-south.

This frees organizations to focus their attention on higher-value services that can have a greater impact on the digital experiences they can develop.

Ready for an upgrade?

Now you know the value of having a control tower view of your APIs, but wonder if it is really as first-class as it sounds? Am I still going to be going from the luggage carousel to the luggage carousel with no idea if my bags made it to my destination or not? We have all been there!

Take a test flight with the coordinates below and see for yourself just how smooth the friendly API skies can be!

Prepare for take-off! Connect AWS APIs to AMPLIFY Catalog

To make sure that you have the best experience possible, first be sure to have the following in order. This will prepare AWS to collect data.

An AMPLIFY Central Service Account. See Manage an API proxy using AMPLIFY CLI.

• API key credentials on AWS. Allow for CLI access
• Amazon CloudWatch Service
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (AWS SQS)
• AWS Lambda
• CloudFormation template. Download here.

All set? Great! Now you are ready to complete the AMPLIFY Central quick start as outlined below: 

1. Set up AMPLIFY Central:
   1. Create an environment object in AMPLIFY Central using either the UI, API or CLI.
   2. Set up a Service Account.
2. Set up AWS CloudFormation using the two templates at https://axway.bintray.com/generic-repo/aws-agents/aws_apigw_agent_config/:
   1. apigw_iam_setup
   2. apigw_cloudformation
3. Create a Discovery Agent environment file:
   1. Move key files to a keys directory.
   2. Log into the Artifactory Repository and pull the latest image of the Discovery Agent.
   3. Start the Discovery Agent.
4. Create a Traceability Agent environment file:
   1. Move key files to a keys directory.
   2. Log in to the Artifactory Repository and pull the latest image of the Traceability Agent.
   3. Start the Traceability Agent.

AMPLIFY Central is your eyes in the sky and on the ground!