SOA Software launched Atmosphere , an API management platform, which enterprises can utilize to manage, monitor and securely expose APIs to customers and developers. SOA Software, an existing enterprise SOA and cloud services governance vendor coincidentally announced their API management solution in the same week as Layer 7. The coincidence is not only temporal but also evolutionary in the sense that both vendors are incrementally building on their SOA foundations.
SOA Software CTO, Alistair Faquharson acknowedges SOA as the elephant in the room but a necessary foundation for a successful API management solution:
APIs focus on revenue generation and channel creation, while SOA has a (perhaps less tangible) message around cost savings and reuse. But these aren’t mutually exclusive — they can blend together so that APIs actually serve to improve your SOA. APIs sharpen the focus in SOA, meeting business goals and bolstering enterprise strategies.
It might look like we’re radically changing our business, that we’re suddenly getting into API management and eschewing our existing model. There is a reason we didn’t take a different path and create a whole new company instead of combining the new with the old – it’s because we think that SOA provides us and our customers a solid backbone for API Management, and we want to prove it.
In response to InfoQ's question on the comparison of their existing closed loop governance solutions against the new API management portal, Ian GoldSmith, VP of Product Management at SOA Software said:
Closed-loop governance typically refers to the process of building services and consumers inside the enterprise as part of internal SOA initiatives. API Management can be a separate initiative, or an extension of this focused on externally facing APIs .
Here are Atmosphere's key capabilities in supporting such external facing initiatives:
- API definition, content, policy and lifecycle management to ensure that APIs are correctly structured and well documented with integration with internal design and development processes
- Intermediation to simplify the creation of RESTful APIs with both XML and JSON content from various internal service types with powerful paging and caching to improve app performance
- Sophisticated security capabilities to help protect the APIs from abuse and ensure the privacy of customer data
- Comprehensive QoS management (SLAs and quotas) to protect internal applications from overload at the API and to provide customers with service-level guarantee
- Extensive consumer contract monitoring and management of traffic from individual apps
- Integrated sandbox, testing and debugging capabilities to simplify the delivery of high-quality APIs
Why only RESTful APIs and no mention of service oriented APIs? Ian responded :
Atmosphere includes a powerful intermediary for publishing and hosting API endpoints. These endpoints can be exposed over http or https as SOAP, REST/XML, or REST/JSON routing to internal services that are any of these types, and can be routed over http, https or JMS transports. We use the example of creating RESTful APIs because many organizations have internal SOAP services and need to expose RESTful services externally.
Atmosphere is now available as an on-premise deployment model, public SaaS model as well as in a hybrid cloud model with a mix of on-premise and public SaaS cloud.