I am very excited to announce the general availability of the Anypoint Platform for APIs July 2014 release. This release places a broad set of rich API tooling at developers fingertips, allowing them to address the entirety of the API lifecycle in a more efficient and effective manner. The release also enables API program owners to deliver a robust API platform that can easily integrate with existing enterprise assets. The significant set of enhancements introduced in this release revolves around three core themes.
360 degree API life-cycle
This new release unifies the user experience across the API lifecycle to streamline the creation, management and consumption of APIs. Now users of the Anypoint Platform for APIs can access all functionality of the platform through a single pane of glass for enhanced usability and visibility across their API programs. This means that API owners can design APIs, publish portals, manage and monitor their APIs and enable API consumers (i.e. application developers) to explore the published portals and register their applications – all in a single product, accessed through a single interface.
Advanced identity management
This release introduces two powerful identity management capabilities that will make medium to large enterprises more effective in their introduction of API programs. The first is an out-of-the-box and easy-on option to leverage an existing PingFederate installation as a federated identity and OAuth provider. Federated identity allows you to reuse your user base’s existing credentials (UID and password) to login to the Anypoint Platform for APIs and establish single-sign-on with other internal and external systems that are also federated. OAuth is becoming the de-facto standard way of managing secure delegated access to APIs and PingFederate’s OAuth provider is a leading solution for enabling OAuth. In addition to identity federation, this releases’ built-in integration with PingFederate allows customers to leverage PingFederate for the OAuth protection of APIs through a policy that can be applied in a single click.
The second important identity management feature introduced in this release is the support for custom roles and fine-grained permissions. These features allow administrators to control at a very granular level which users have access to which pieces of functionality. As an example, one could configure two roles – acme_external_admin and acme_external_consumer – that map to the APIs of the “acme” department. The administrator could restrict these roles to have access to consume only the APIs of the acme department.
Henceforth, all users belonging to these roles will have only the restricted set of privileges are associated with them.
Powerful analytics
The Anypoint Platform for APIs now includes a powerful analytics system that provides API program owners with deep insight into the usage and performance of their APIs. The analytics system provides a built-in overview dashboard and the ability to create custom charts and dashboards. API owners can report on API traffic, application usage, response times, geographic usage as well as many other metrics. All data from these dashboards and charts can be exported for use in external tools.
Get started today
You can start using the new version today by signing up at anypoint.mulesoft.com. Lookout for more information on this new version in the coming weeks, including a demo of the new platform delivered in a webinar.
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