By Shantanu Kaushik
Cloud computing has over-turned the traditional way of doing things with a more sophisticated and advanced approach for data handling. It is a paradigm shift in terms of computing and accessibility. Since the concept of cloud computing was introduced, it had all the necessary bits to be the next big thing. The evolution of cloud computing caused many major stakeholders to adopt. This evolution has led to a more enhanced and connected way of doing things. Alibaba Cloud has played a major role in this evolution cycle. The products and services within the Alibaba Cloud multiverse have set industry standards or improved them.
APIs have always been life-savers for the developer. As we have already discussed how important APIs are and how they can play a major role in a project development lifecycle, we are not going to discuss it any further. In this article, we are going to discuss the different industry models used by the API gateway service and the related use-case scenarios.
Building the perfect ecosystem requires more than understanding a list of concepts. Alibaba Cloud API Gateway works in a way that enables developers or administrators to have better-integration practices with multiple enterprises. This gives access to a wider set of tools and peers to share information or functionality with.
Let's look at a small workflow of how this happens:
These collaborative efforts can be called partnerships. These limitless partnerships can pan across technologies or industries to make an ecosystem that is highly-diverse, scalable, and open to adaptation. This practice is one of the core goals of the API Gateway.
Our world is changing. If we look at 2020, the world has adopted a new normal. During these times, we have realized how prone to failure our economy can be. Any particular stress member can cause a catastrophic failure. One particular segment of society that stood strong was the technical side of things. Moreover, the technical infrastructure didn't just stand strong; it evolved to counter the effects of a failing economy and world.
During these crucial times, Alibaba Cloud helped organizations deal with unfortunate situations and overcome them. Let's see how invested and inventive the API Gateway model for businesses has been and how your organization can benefit from it.
API Gateway provides a standard set of APIs that allow the developer to work on new services. This enables the developer to start building without having to think about the basics and certain fundamental functionalities that are a must-have for any developer or development team. This fuels innovation and helps create a more productive ecosystem.
API Gateway caters to multiple businesses and organizations in different trades and operations, including the stock market, hospitality, or meteorological departments. The API marketplace hosts something for everyone. As a result of this diverse platform, the API gateway extends a great monetization environment for any developer. The openness of this PaaS product lets developers publish, control, manage, and sell APIs easily on the marketplace.
If your practices are of a certain nature, the API Gateway lets you make feature purchases. These purchases can be used for inner business modeling and core practice enhancements since you will save critical time working on the enhancements rather than development. As a developer, the Continuous Integration and link to Kubernetes allow the development and operations teams to collaborate for a better and more efficient DevOps practice.
Let's start by looking at a visualization depicting the multi-environment compatibility scenario of the API Gateway.
The scalability of your business is the prime mover when selecting any service. The total computing and information overview have considerably changed and is evolving further. With tech pieces like IoT and practices like DevOps, the amount of data and terminals that are in play have also increased. API Gateway provides seamless compatibility with multiple platforms and works across complex architectures to provide a scalable, highly-available, and connected system. As a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product, the API Gateway talks to multiple-platforms using pre-set APIs.
Alibaba Cloud API Gateway has reduced the overall time and costs involved in integration practices. The platform is a resource for a development team to leverage. The only thing that is needed is how and for which platform you wish to build. With the integration of enterprise systems using the API Gateway, it all comes down to the selection of tools and APIs to let businesses focus on their core nature.
Let's think about a scenario where organizational level access control is required. The first product that will come to mind is Alibaba Cloud's Resource Access Management (RAM). It is responsible for identity and access management and has been connected to almost every product within the Alibaba Cloud multiverse. Similarly, you can use the RAM to manage user permissions for the API Gateway.
With RAM's integration into the API Gateway, you can easily implement user authorization and resource control. With RAM, you can grant different levels of permissions to multiple users and change them on the fly. You can also implement a tag-based authorization for users if you wish to isolate specific resources for your Alibaba Cloud account.
API Gateway is a product that has core business sense built into its DNA. API Gateway is a customer-centric product that provides a strong backend. With VPC support, links to Kubernetes clusters alongside Terraform for IAC, and a dedicated marketplace, this PaaS product from Alibaba Cloud is one of the strongest players for ecosystem development.
From a DevOps practice to API architecture development, the level of technical support and implementation scenarios that the API Gateway provides is unparalleled. This concludes the series on API Gateway. Please stay tuned for additional topics.
1. Hybrid Cloud – Integration and Practices Part 1
We will discuss multiple aspects of Hybrid Cloud, its integration, and practices.
The views expressed herein are for reference only and don't necessarily represent the official views of Alibaba Cloud.
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Smart Access Gateway
SmartAG provides an end-to-end cloud deployment solution for connecting hardware and software to Alibaba Cloud.
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API Gateway
API Gateway provides you with high-performance and high-availability API hosting services to deploy and release your APIs on Alibaba Cloud products.
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RAM(Resource Access Management)
Secure your cloud resources with Resource Access Management to define fine-grained access permissions for users and groups
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Alibaba Cloud Flow
An enterprise-level continuous delivery tool.
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