Newest Release of WSO2 API Manager Adds Multi-tenancy, Becomes First API Management Product to Enable Federated Access to APIs Across Multiple Entities

Open source WSO2 API Manager fosters new business models for monetizing APIs, provides unmatched flexibility for deploying on servers and in the cloud

PALO ALTO, Calif.--()--Managed APIs are empowering enterprises to take advantage of new opportunities for monetization and ecosystem development by extending processes and services to customers, partners, and other groups within the organization. WSO2 significantly expands on these capabilities with WSO2 API Manager 1.4, which introduces two industry firsts. Now featuring full native multi-tenancy, API Manager is:

  • The first API management product that can run on servers, in a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud environment—all from the same software.
  • The first API management product that enables federated access to APIs across multiple entities, enabling new models for organizations to collaborate and monetize APIs.

Version 1.4 is the latest release of WSO2 API Manager, which launched in August 2012 as the first 100% open source API management product to combine easy, managed API access with full API governance and analysis. As the first API management product to offer an API Store, it lets IT organizations set up their own Apple or Google Marketplace-like store where developers can easily subscribe to and consume APIs. Meanwhile it provides API publishers with complete API lifecycle governance—from creating to publishing, deprecating and retiring APIs—as well as analytics and metrics to support decision-making and enforce service-level agreement (SLA) policies. WSO2 API Manager is built on the same WSO2 technology used by enterprises around the world, including a Global 1000 company that is handling more than 1 billion API calls per day.

“As the cloud lowers the technical barriers to enterprises collaborating, organizations are now seeking new ways to, not only promote their own APIs, but also those of third-parties with common interests and objectives,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “By providing native multi-tenancy, our WSO2 API Manager product is opening the door to new cloud-based API marketplace models while ensuring that participants have full control over the terms of use for their APIs.”

Multi-tenancy on Servers and in the Cloud

WSO2 API Manager 1.4 runs directly on server hardware or in a virtualized environment, such as an Amazon or VMware cloud, bringing the efficiencies of multi-tenancy and self-service to on-premises deployments. Additionally, the cloud-ready WSO2 API Manager 1.4 software can plug into the WSO2 Stratos platform as a service (PaaS) foundation to operate as part of a PaaS, adding cloud-native capabilities, such as elastic scaling, expanded self-service provisioning, metering, billing, and storage, among others. The move brings unprecedented ease to IT professionals, enabling them to deploy their API management implementation on-premises, on a PaaS, or in a hybrid environment from the same software.

Managing APIs Across Multiple Entities

The inherent multi-tenancy now available within WSO2 API Manager 1.4 allows organizations to manage isolation between departments, partners or simply between separate development groups. As a result, organizations can implement federated access to APIs.

For example, an enterprise may use WSO2 API Manager to offer a central API store in which APIs in different languages are available, provided by different experts in those languages. Those who want to consume the APIs may choose to obtain them through the central store or they may go to participating tenants, such as the German store or French store to obtain the APIs in those languages.

Similarly, the government of a state or province may want to federate access to APIs managed by different agencies. With WSO2 API Manager, domains can be established for each agency, each of which can push the APIs out to stores or make them public.

Additional WSO2 API Manager Enhancements

WSO2 API Manager features an API Publisher, API Store, and API Gateway. Using WSO2 API Manager, IT organizations can publish both production and sandbox keys for APIs to enable easy developer testing, and developer interactions with APIs can be managed via comments and ratings. WSO2 API Manager supports SOAP, REST, JSON and XML-style APIs, and it enables one-click deployment to the API gateway for immediate publishing. The API Store provides a collaborative Web interface for consumers to self-register, discover API functionality, subscribe to APIs, evaluate them, and interact with API publishers. API governance is complemented by capabilities for monitoring API use, performance and SLA compliance. Secure authorization of APIs is provided using the OAuth 2.0 standard for key management.

In addition to incorporating native multi-tenancy, WSO2 API Manager 1.4:

  • Introduces a framework for testing and documenting what an API does based on the Swagger specification. WSO2 API Manager can generate documentation automatically, or publishers can create their own.
  • Adds single sign-on through the Security Access Mark-up Language (SAML).
  • Extends OAuth support to provide more ways to generate access keys.

WSO2 API Manager Builds on WSO2 Carbon Platform

WSO2 API Manager is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the award-winning WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all WSO2 middleware products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses proven core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. Additionally, it offers a graphical management console, which is integrated with other WSO2 middleware products, for configuration, management and monitoring.

The componentized architecture gives enterprises unprecedented flexibility to customize WSO2 API Manager by adding WSO2 Carbon middleware products or the 175-plus components on which they are based. Since components can be decoupled—for example decoupling API gateway clusters that manage traffic from the API Store—organizations can easily scale as their demands grow.

Availability and Support

WSO2 API Manager 1.4 is available today as a software download that can run directly on servers or on top of the WSO2 Stratos PaaS foundation; as a WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machine running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and VMware ESX; and as a hosted service on the WSO2 StratosLive PaaS. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 API Manager is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStartSM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit http://wso2.com, or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

Trademarks and registered trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

Contacts

Kinetic.PR, LLC
Rebecca Hurst, 650-679-9282
Mobile: 650-274-7533
rebecca@kineticprllc.com

Release Summary

Newest release of open source WSO2 API Manager fosters new business models for monetizing APIs, provides unmatched flexibility for deploying on servers and in the cloud

Contacts

Kinetic.PR, LLC
Rebecca Hurst, 650-679-9282
Mobile: 650-274-7533
rebecca@kineticprllc.com