In this VMblog Q&A, Alex Drag, Director of Product Marketing at Gravitee, discusses the company’s innovative approach to federated API management. Drag explains how federated API management differs from traditional methods by abstracting the management and governance of APIs away from being tied to a specific API gateway. This allows organizations to use a single management console and developer portal to manage, secure, publish and govern any API across any gateway or event broker.
Drag also provides insights into how Gravitee achieves visibility across diverse API gateways and brokers, the business rationale behind supporting competitive gateways, and how federated management fits into Gravitee’s three pillars of modern API management. And he previews Gravitee’s upcoming Edge virtual conference, where the company will unveil new federated API management capabilities among other innovations.
VMblog: Can you explain the concept of federated API management and how it changes from how companies were managing their APIs in the past?
Alex Drag: For us, Federated API Management enables organizations to manage, secure, publish, and govern any API from any API Gateway or event broker-using a single management console and Developer Portal. Any API. Any Gateway. Any Broker. That’s the federation motto for us.
Unlike the more traditional approach-where most API Management functionality was inextricably tied to the specific API Gateway being used-Gravitee Federated API Management abstracts much of the management and governance of your APIs away from the API Gateway. Don’t get me wrong, the API Gateway is still a crucial component of infrastructure, but we want to empower teams to use whatever API Gateway best fits their use case, while still helping them achieve proper governance.
This enables central Platform teams to use Gravitee to manage and govern every API without having to context switch between different tools. It’s one management layer that sits on top of all of your underlying gateways as a governance “wrapper.” Platform teams will be able to do everything from API discovery and inventory, measure spec compliance, design subscription flows, and publish APIs to the portal for self-service discovery and consumption-all with a single solution.
VMblog: How is it possible for Gravitee to have this visibility across myriad API gateways and event brokers, whether it be Amazon API Gateway or Google Apigee?
Drag: Of course, I can’t give away too much of the recipe, but we have some very clever ways of being able to automatically discover APIs and services that exist across multiple API Gateways and different event brokers. From there, we can import those services into a management and governance layer where things like subscription control and subscription information can be centrally viewed. And this is just the beginning for us. We have plans for all sorts of visibility and governance-related benefits. So keep an eye on us for the next several months.
VMblog: So you are essentially providing a single pane of glass for API governance, which for your customers seems like a huge value add. But as a business, did you have any hesitation to provide value for teams that were using competitive API gateways?
Drag: It’s the right question to ask. You’re right, historically API Management and API Gateway solutions made money by selling that core component of API Management: the API Gateway.
That said, we don’t want to base our offering and strategy solely on what has worked for legacy providers in the past. We want to base our offering around what our customers need both now and going forward into the future. It’s our belief that, if we build the best solution possible for our customer base, that we stand a great chance of really succeeding as a business. For us, there is no ‘success for us, but not for our customers.’ These two are inextricably linked, and we will continue to do our best to drive the most possible value for our customers.
VMblog: Gravitee was named a visionary by Gartner and I am interested in how this new federated approach will change things for customers, and also how it fits into the broader scope of the three pillars of modern API management that Gravitee has outlined?
Drag: For us, this empowers Gravitee teams to be the world’s most advanced “API governors” out there. If you’re an organization that does want to consolidate on a single Gateway and Management solution, then great-our platform makes it easy to manage, secure, and govern everything from SOAP to REST to gRPC to GraphQL to Kafka event APIs. If you do already have legacy API Gateways running around in the org, then great-now, you’ll have a universal management and governance layer on top of all of that distributed API Gateway infrastructure.
Either way, you have one solution to design and enforce API Management best practices around API design, security, deployment, exposure, and publication. And that means top-notch API governance.
Federation really makes up the first of the three pillars, those being:
- Multi-Gateway and multi broker
- Event native
- AI-forward
For us, modern API Management is about being able to centrally manage, govern, and secure a broad swath of your services as APIs. Being able to do that for multiple different API Gateways and Event Brokers is a massive part of that, but it’s just the beginning for us.
VMblog: I just want to wrap up by asking about Gravitee Edge! This is a 3-day virtual conference dedicated to talks around API management happening June 26-28. What can attendees expect to get out of the conference and where can they sign up if they wish to tune in?
Drag: We are very excited about this year’s Edge conference. Last year was our inaugural Edge, and it was truly awesome. You can attend virtually here.
Like last year, the agenda is packed with API innovators from leading global organizations such as Roche, Blue Yonder, PostNL and more. Our customers are sharing sessions around topics such as modernizing banking with event-native API Management, transforming postal services with API Management, and delivering future-proof supply chain solutions-all driven by a modern approach to API Management.
And, of course, we’ll be talking a lot about Federation and where we see the Gravitee platform going in the future. I’ll give a brief hint: Federated API Management isn’t the only new thing we are unveiling at the conference.
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