Open Source WSO2 API Manager 1.9 Now Available

WSO2 has enhances the API management platform capabilities with the release of WSO2 API Manager 1.9, which is fully open source and runs on servers and in the cloud. With this latest version, WSO2 API Manager offers plugin support for third-party key servers, allowing companies to use their existing infrastructure to authenticate API consumers.

WSO2 API Manager now supports the Swagger 2.0, the open source API framework providing a plugin for SmartBear’s Ready! API for API testing; and embeds the Swagger editor to enable the representation of an API throughout its entire life cycle. This release also adds to its API Store the ability to provide a shared view of applications and subscriptions within a group of users to facilitate collaboration. Additionally, it enhances API analytics by generating more statistics on API events providing additional analytics dashboards.

WSO2 API Manager is an 100% open source API management product combining managed API access with API governance and analysis. It provides the ability for organizations to set up their own consumer-like API Store where developers can subscribe to and consume APIs. It provides API publishers with complete API lifecycle governance, from creating to publishing, deprecating and retiring APIs, as well as analytics and metrics to support decision-making and enforce service-level agreement (SLA) policies.

The multitenant, cloud-enabled WSO2 API Manager software can run on servers, in a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud environment, providing  flexibility to support a range of API-driven applications, from Web commerce to partner ecosystems and the Internet of Things. Federated access to APIs across multiple entities provides the opportunity to create new models for collaborating and monetizing APIs. WSO2 API Manager is pre-integrated with all other products in the company’s WSO2 platform.

WSO2 API Manager features an API Publisher, API Store, and API Gateway. Using WSO2 API Manager, IT teams can publish both production and sandbox keys for APIs to enable developer testing, and developer interactions with APIs can be managed via comments and ratings. WSO2 API Manager supports SOAP, REST, JSON and XML-style APIs, and it enables one-click deployment to one or multiple API gateways for immediate publishing.

The API Store provides a Web interface for users to self-register, discover API functionality, subscribe to APIs, evaluate them, and interact with API publishers. API governance is complemented by capabilities for monitoring API use, performance and SLA compliance. Secure authorization of APIs is provided using the OAuth 2.0 standard for key management; meanwhile single sign-on is enabled through the Security Access Mark-up Language (SAML).

WSO2 API Manager 1.9 is available as a software download that can run directly on servers; on cloud platforms such as, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), OpenStack, and VMware VSphere; or on top of WSO2 Private PaaS. Additionally, customers can choose to have WSO2 host WSO2 API Manager through the WSO2 Managed Cloud service or on WSO2 API Cloud. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.

Highlights of the new features include:

In addition to providing its own key server, the highly extensible WSO2 API Manager 1.9 now allows third-party key servers to be plugged in. As a result, enterprises that already have deployed a key server for authenticating users can use it with WSO2 API Manager to authenticate API consumers. Not only does this enable IT organizations to leverage their existing infrastructure investment; it also eliminates the redundancy of having to generate multiple keys for existing users. 

Version 1.9 also features enhanced integration with WSO2 Identity Server, which facilitates the automatic binding of applications created using WSO2 API Manager with service providers of WSO2 Identity Server.

WSO2 API Manager provides a framework for testing and documenting what an API does based on the Swagger specification; it can generate documentation automatically, or publishers can create their own. With version 1.9, WSO2 API Manager upgrades from Swagger 1.2 to 2.0, and embeds the Swagger editor to seamlessly update the representation of the API across the entire life cycle - whether developers are creating, publishing, testing, managing or consuming APIs. 

Version 1.9 also features a plugin to newest version of SmartBear’s Ready! API, which supports Swagger 2.0. Using the plugin, users can import an API into Ready! API simply by providing the WSO2 API Manager connection details and selecting the API to test, creating a seamless experience.

With WSO2 API Manager 1.9, the API Store adds the ability to provide a shared view of applications and subscriptions within a group of users to facilitate collaboration. Apps and API subscriptions (i.e., API keys) created by one user can be managed by other users within the same group. As a result, developers working on the same application can share the keys and see the statistics for an application in the API Store. Additionally, if one developer leaves, someone else in the group can still manage the subscription. Admins, who have access to multiple groups, can switch between the groups and view the respective apps and subscriptions accordingly.

WSO2 API Manager features an analytics framework that handles all API usage data published to it from the API Gateway. This framework is pre-integrated with WSO2’s analytics platform, which can perform both batch and real-time analytics on the same events, providing the ability to view metrics by user, API and more. It also allows IT professionals to create their own analytical apps to gain insights into APIs published with WSO2 API Manager or to plug in their own reporting engines for customized reporting. Version 1.9 now captures additional statistics based on throttling, faults, latency, workflows, approval/rejection of self-registration, subscription and app creation, and it provides dashboards for statistical visualization to provide insights into API performance and usage.

WSO2 API Manager 1.9 enables customers to get up and running in just a minute using a new sample API that can be published with the click of a button when the product is launched for the first time. Then the user can sign up to the API Store, subscribe to that API, and test it, gaining understanding of how WSO2 API Manager works.

WSO2 API Manager is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all Carbon-based WSO2 products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. WSO2 API Manager offers scalability, since it uses the same core technologies and runtime of WSO2 Carbon, which are handling anywhere from millions to billions of API calls per day at enterprises around the world.

Additionally, the componentized architecture maximizes the flexibility enterprises have when deploying WSO2 API Manager. Because the software is cloud-enabled, WSO2 API Manager can migrate between servers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid cloud environments. Any WSO2 API Manager components, including API Publisher, API Store, and API Gateway, can be decoupled and allocated to different compute resources, making it easy to scale to meet growing demand. Enterprises can customize WSO2 API Manager by adding WSO2 Carbon middleware products or the 175-plus components on which they are based.

WSO2 API Manager 1.9 is available as a software download that can run directly on servers; on cloud platforms such as, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), OpenStack, and VMware VSphere; or on top of WSO2 Private PaaS. Additionally, customers can choose to have WSO2 host WSO2 API Manager through the WSO2 Managed Cloud service or on WSO2 API Cloud. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.