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In the last 20 years, API adoption across every enterprise grew exponentially in pursuit of business velocity and process efficiencies. As organizations adopted API-led connectivity, they leveraged APIs as a connective tissue to bind their digital ecosystems, enterprises started adopting multiple fragmented solutions in their underlying technology stacks. 

API sprawl across the modern enterprise

Siloed teams using heterogeneous environments, diverse architectures, and disparate solutions for their use cases led to what some industry experts are now referring to as API sprawl – the next big challenge for API-led businesses. Here are four reasons API sprawl limits modern enterprises: 

  1. It is difficult for enterprises to simply identify, access, and use all the APIs that exist in their organization leading to a duplication of efforts. 
  2. Disconnected management consoles being used across diverse platforms makes it tedious to observe everything that’s going on and be sure that things are working correctly. 
  3. APIs operating in different platforms and hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environments follow inconsistent quality standards, making it hard to ensure compliance and usability. 
  4. Every API represents a point on the security perimeter that can be potentially compromised if not architected properly. 

Organizations cannot afford to rip and replace their existing technology stacks to solve these problems. The biggest challenge today is to achieve flexibility in development while maintaining centralized visibility and control across services. 

Introducing Universal API management on Anypoint Platform

Universal API management on Anypoint Platform is a collection of new and existing products that will provide MuleSoft customers a single control plane to enable comprehensive visibility, flexible management, and consistent governance at scale. It is the next evolution of API management, opening the scope of full lifecycle management capabilities to APIs that are built and deployed anywhere. 

With Universal API management, enterprises will be able to work with APIs of any origin, in any architecture or environment while engaging their internal and external API ecosystems. Using new and updated products, MuleSoft’s goal with universal API management is to help our customers in the following ways: 

Accelerate application delivery by composing services using any API across the enterprise built by any team, on any platform. 

  • API Design Center (updated): Along with the capabilities offered today, developers can now build APIs using GraphQL in DataGraph (Available now) or AsyncAPI specification in API Designer (Available now).
  • Anypoint CLI (updated): Developers can now automatically catalog, discover and reuse API specifications built on any platform into Exchange, using their CI/CD pipelines (available in the coming weeks).

Build modern architectures and applications by managing and securing any service at scale, no matter the size, language, or cloud.

  • Flex Gateway (new): Control and secure APIs running anywhere with ultrafast response times and a low footprint using a gateway that integrates seamlessly with DevOps and CI/CD workflows (Available now).

Achieve consistent security and governance across every API operating in any environment

  • API Manager (updated): Manage users and services in a unified control plane. Developers can improve the reliability of their APIs with contextual insights (Available now).
  • API Governance (new): Ensure consistent quality and compliance across all APIs without adding overheads to development (available).

Create vibrant API ecosystems and maximize the value of your API investments.

  • Anypoint Exchange (updated): Create a consolidated source of truth for all enterprise APIs and package your APIs into products
  • API Community Manager: Build pixel-perfect experiences to publish your APIs for your API communities 
  • API Experience Hub (coming soon): Build developer portals in minutes using fully built templates to publish APIs from Exchange to any audience.

How can universal API management help your organization? 

Let’s look at a few of the ways UAPIM can help your business work more efficiently. 

Developers 

With the ability to design APIs in new specifications like AsyncAPI and GraphQL, developers can now address advanced API-led integrations and build seamless customer experiences easily. Across the lifecycle, products and solutions like Flex Gateway and API catalog CLI integrate seamlessly with DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows and deliver the performance required for the most demanding applications, simplifying development and manageability. 

There are myriad API gateway options from the cloud vendors, open source gateways, and more that aim to solve either niche or broad use cases with varying degree of capabilities. Ultimately, what API owners want is a gateway that satisfies a number of use cases and easily plugs into their existing technology landscape, CI/CD pipelines and development lifecycles. Flex Gateway provides ultrafast response times on a small footprint making it suitable for all use cases – to manage traditional north-south traffic patterns or as a container sidecar for east west traffic or ingress controller across any container cluster. Flex Gateway can also be managed through the web interface or through declarative configuration files seamlessly working with any CI/CD workflow, virtually operating in any environment

API product managers

With the ability to create a single source of truth for all enterprise APIs in Anypoint Exchange, every API will become discoverable and accessible. In this universal catalog, every API can be productized and governed to a consistent quality, making them consumable. Fully templated developer portals built on API Experience Hub (coming soon) will make it easy to build, grow, and engage internal and external API communities with effortless administration. 

Architects

Governance has always been seen as a necessary component that adds friction to development. As a first of its kind, with the new Anypoint API Governance, architects will be able to govern APIs to consistent quality and security to comply with industry regulations (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA) and internal standards like naming conventions, infosec rules, and more while enabling developers to maintain delivery speed. With a central repository of governance rules and best practices, architects can empower developers to seamlessly add pre-defined governance controls to APIs during development for real-time validations to reduce review cycles in development.

Learn more about universal API management

At MuleSoft Transform 2021, we announced our vision for Universal API management on Anypoint Platform. At TrailblazerDX, we highlighted our new products that power Universal API management on Anypoint Platform. 

We can’t wait for you to try the products and features and use it to build modern applications and architectures. See the full list of product releases below: 

Universal API Management on Anypoint Platform

We’re excited to see these products in the hands of our community of developers, product managers, and architects. We look forward to how you will use them to enable your composable enterprise.

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If you missed MuleSoft Transform or TrailblazerDX, you can now watch the sessions on demand. Check out our developer tutorials to get started quickly. Make sure to register for MuleSoft CONNECT to catch these products in action! 

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