Upgrading your Enterprise Integrator: An overview

Businesses these days depend on a steadily developing number of software applications to keep their everyday tasks running stronger. Furthermore, it’s upto Engineers to keep all these applications working together. Therefore, IT is confronted with numerous cloud applications, on-premises applications, and information — furthermore trade pioneers who foresee everything to work reliably and give the data they need in real-time. WSO2 API Manager helps relieve this burden by connecting applications, data, and devices.

APIs fill the gap between the microservices and the customers. It conveys value to the clients by making the tasks acceptable and efficient. But most of the time, single units of services are not enough to build a complete business solution. Be that as it may, more often than not, multiple units are required to work together to assemble a total business arrangement. In that case, we indeed integrate service bridges to generate valuable products.

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator can help you make the most of API Manager by assessing your current integration state, looking at your processes, applications and data, and designing a future-ready integration solution built according to best practices.

APIM 4.0 is offering organizations the ability to have a unified platform that tracks each API and integration from end to end.

In this article, we will discuss why it is recommended to migrate to APIM-4.0.0 from EI to make your business a success.

Introduction

In addition to the existing API, manager 3.x.x and EI 7.x.x, there are more features added to increase the value of the new product. It is completely a platform to build and manage APIs. Therefore, you can design, implement managed APIs and build integration services from the ground up and expose them as managed APIs. There are a variety of options to build integration services and a seamless service discovery of integration service through the service catalog. Moreover, it is a platform for integrating event based back-end systems that is to build streaming integration and expose as Asynchronous APIs. Another important feature introduced in APIM 4.0 is optimized gateways for different deployment environments such as API Microgateway as the default choice in k8s and API Gateway for On-prem VM based deployments.

In addition to the integration support, we provide API manager features as well. WSO2 API Manager provides a web based portal backed by REST APIs to govern the API creation process. It enables API creators to convert their backend services into APIs by providing a wizard based UI.

Now let’s have a look at the features of the WSO2 API manager that enable us to build an API management platform with the following characteristics.

• Design, implement, and publish APIs
• Empower Developer by providing a collaborative environment
• QoS for APIs
• Insight into API usage, developer behavior, and system
• Optionally provide the ability to monetize the API
• Design, implement, and publish APIs

WSO2 API Manager contains the following modules:

• API Publisher: Permits API creators to design, implement, and document APIs and allows API product managers to manage the lifecycle of APIs and create API products by utilizing at least one APIs.
• Developer Portal: A portal for incorporating application creators. It allows application creators to find, subscribe, test, and consume APIs through their applications.
• API Gateway: Allows admittance to APIs/services by steering application traffic to the significant endpoints. The API Gateway is the part that enforces security, rate-limiting, and changes on API requests while feeding valuable information of these requests to API Analytics.

• Key Manager: The security token service of the API Manager is responsible to deal with everything related to authentication and authorization of API requests. It supports a wide variety of security protocols, for example, OAuth2.0/OIDC, Basic Auth, API Key, SAML based single-sign-on.
• Traffic Manager: Controls the traffic flow of the API gateway. This is utilized to apply request quotas on APIs for monetization, access control, or security-related issues. In addition to configuring the available policies, users can deploy their approaches/policies on the traffic manager which will control the pace of traffic on the API gateways.

For more information on WSO2 API Manager, see the overview in the WSO2 API Manager 4.0 documentation and go to the product page on WSO2 API Manager on the WSO2 website.

Let’s look at the highlights of the improvements and the new features of the API manager shipped along with it.

• API revision feature to provide a way to revert to a previous change and tracking ad-hoc changes done through the publisher.
• Manage, monetize, secure, and audit event streams and support for Server Sent Events (SSE), WebHook, and WebSocket.
• Analytics will be provided as a cloud solution to both on-prem and cloud customers(managed by WSO2)
• Enhanced CI/CD support with apictl and operator.
• Improvements related to GraphQL, MI dashboard, key management connectors, and many more.

What’s new in EI?

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator is continuously improving in every new release. Listed below are the new features and improvements of EI that are introduced with the APIM 4.0 release.

New in the Micro Integrator

MI 4.0.0 runtime introduces a new DSS mediator to call DSS services directly from the mediation layer avoiding the network call. OAuth support has been added to the HTTP endpoint. Freemarker template support has been added to the PayloadFactory mediator to customize the payloads in a more fruitful manner. Secure vault has been enhanced to integrate with Hashicorp. There also some minor improvements were done to the call mediator and Enrich mediator

New in WSO2 Integration Studio

The following features and improvements are available for the WSO2 Integration Studio of APIM 4.0

• OAS 3 support
• Kubernetes project exporter improvement (CRD + Pure Kubernetes resource generation)
• Docker exporter project improvement
• Seamless support for CI/CD workflow ad APIM service catalog

Integration Studio provides support to create APIs from OAS 3 definitions. There are several improvements done in the Studio to cater to the requirements of the Service Catalog in API Manager. The embedded Micro Integrator runtime now can be changed via an update. There are improvements done to the Docker, Kubernetes Exporter project to facilitate CI/CD automation.

New in the Streaming Integrator

Streaming Integrator of APIM 4.0 introduces the capability to deploy Async APIs to API Manager Service Catalog. Async APIs can now be generated from Streaming Integrator tooling.

Why is it recommended to migrate?

We aim to be the best end-to-end solution for API management and integration requirements. APIM 4.0 is a solution to get rid of using two different products to manage API and integrate the microservices. Since APIM 4.0 0 is a combination of API manager and integration, we believe that it will help the organization to implement cloud-native engineering processes. Also cloud API management and integration offer all the user demands such as cloud and hybrid and on-premise support. It is efficient to operate millions of APIs, which is an effective Kubernetes infrastructure with low CPU memory and disk. Furthermore, it supports the transformation of layered architecture into decentralized and integrating analytics and billing into a wider distributed ecosystem. As referenced above, APIM 4.0 provides a lot more highlights to satisfy your necessity to make the best integration and API management solutions. To investigate all these best integration and API management features, do download the APIM 4.0 and follow the official product documentation to begin. Additionally, you can discover plenty of resources on YouTube and Medium.