During the last few quarters, a number of significant new capabilities around community engagement, API documentation, and lifecycle management have been added to Amplify Enterprise Marketplace. Let’s highlight a few of these.
Community engagement
As a marketplace owner, you want to get insights into the success of your API products. The number of subscriptions in combination with the usage insights can tell you the adoption as a measure of success but won’t be able to tell you what the users like about your product or where it needs improvement.
Dive deeper into understanding API productization
Consumers of Amplify Marketplace are now able to rate and add reviews of published API products to help other users to find the best product for their usage and to help the API providers to improve their products.
Users can leave a star rating between 1 and 5 (with 1 being a low degree of satisfaction and 5 being a high degree of excellence). In addition to that, consumers can leave feedback to the provider using the review capability.
Marketplace owners can enable a moderation process for approving or rejecting a review, whereby the moderation can be manual or automatic. In the case of manual moderation, webhooks are available to plug in any third-party solution to help you analyze the comments and to facilitate the review and management of approvals.
For example, take a look at this moderation process using AWS Comprehend recorded by Leor Brenman:
Product documentation
To drive the adoption of APIs, comprehensive documentation is a must. Often, documentation is written by a variety of writers, and often documents are standardized and reused across the API products.
To accommodate this from a scaling and persona perspective, we added a new module, the Documentation Library.
This allows Amplify Enterprise customers to centralize documentation, enabling them to have dedicated writers create and update content, without affecting the product lifecycle, as well as the reuse / sharing of common documents across multiple products.
Three main document types are supported:
- Markdown documents
- Uploaded documents (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, …)
- External URL references
For each of the types, version control is integrated to keep track of the changes.
Not only can these documents be used to be included as part of API Product documentation, but these documents can also be used as articles that can be referenced in the various navigational menus.
Once you update the Document Library document, it is automatically available / updated in the places where it has been integrated.
Lifecycle management
To better accommodate the varying nature and complexity of our customers’ API landscapes, a number of enhancements have been made to better visualize the API lifecycle. This manifests in 3 main areas:
- The API stage (where is it deployed)
- The API state (what is the maturity level)
- Custom version labels (e.g. Spring 2024 instead of the default semantic versioning being used) and version visibility/automatic archival
API stage
The API stage represents the lifecycle of the API: development, pre-prod, prod… The Stage assignment is part of the environment definition in Amplify Enterprise Marketplace.
We do allow you to have multiple stages for a particular environment. Users can assign a default stage. Endpoints for discovered services in that environment do get that stage assigned by default.
API Providers can manage the stage visibility. This allows them to define which consumer (groups) can see the endpoint associated to the stage.
Illustratively, an API product can contain a same resource with multiple stages, but the “Development” stage may not be exposed to external consumers, only to internal developer groups.
API state
The State represents the current API state in its lifecycle. The state assignment can be one of the following:
- Design
- Experimental
- Pre-release
- Active
- Deprecated
- Archived.
Assigning a state to an API endpoint helps consumers to make an informative decision when using the API. For instance, when API state is deprecated, it surely the time to look at a later version of the API, or an alternative API altogether.
API product versioning
By default, Amplify Enterprise Marketplace generates a semantic version using the [Major].[Minor].[Patch] scheme. This default labeling may not match the versioning scheme that has been adopted for the communication with your customers.
To accommodate this, it is now possible to assign your own custom version labels. To keep your Marketplace tidy and reduce the management overhead, it is now also possible to configure to automatically archive previous product releases.
Besides this, a new setting allows you to control what is shown to your Marketplace users: the standard generated semantic version or the custom label, and users can control what versions are shown – all product versions, or only the most recent published version.
See also: Automate API product creation with Amplify Enterprise Marketplace’s command line interface
Expanded support for API styles
Other API styles are getting more traction in the market, like Async, and GraphQL. Amplify Enterprise Marketplace is the place for all your APIs, regardless of the API Style.
In a recent demo of Axway’s Amplify Platform, Arun Dorairajan, Senior Solution Architect at Axway, gives a glimpes at what this support makes possible for developer teams.
See also: Different types of APIs explained: styles, protocols, audiences + real-life examples
To accommodate these trends in API usage, various enhancements have been added. We dive deeper into this in our upcoming blog on API sprawl, stay tuned!
We’ve also shared more about our new agents that expand support to additional edge gateways, infrastructure, and repositories: learn more about Amplify Agents and how they enable true universal/federated API management here. Notably, the new Amplify Graylog agent enables integration of Graylog’s API Security product with Amplify, making it easier to track down and neutralize zombie APIs and other unmanaged assets.
These enhancements to our platform will allow you to better understand what your consumers like and don’t like in your API products. We aim to give you the tools to manage the API lifecycle in a more transparent way with your end-users, control the exposure of endpoints in a more granular manner, and align API product versioning with the versioning scheme that has been adapted in your organization.