webMethods AppMesh announced by Software AG

Software AG unveiled webMethods AppMesh, a configurable control plane for microservices, APIs and service mesh. Built as an extension of Software AG’s industry-leading webMethods API Management Platform, webMethods AppMesh adds application context to service mesh, which provides better agility, management, and governance of microservices as business apps.

Designed to plug into any service mesh, webMethods AppMesh gives organizations the application awareness needed to manage API-led integrations with more efficiency. Specifically, the new tool allows organizations to apply business rules to drive application-specific behavior, create application-level governance and security policies, add new services and capabilities, and perform context-aware application routing and orchestration – all without changing existing microservices or the underlying code.

Jerzy Niemojewski, CTO of Savangard, a European IT services and consultancy company specializing in Integration and API Management, says: "As a seasoned integrator with a professional team, we focus on integration and business processes automation projects. Our customers want the ability to leverage microservices to quickly add new applications without having to re-write code or change their architecture. We know that service mesh technology will move us in this direction and working with Software AG and their new webMethods AppMesh product will allow us to address the application layer aspects of our customer’s microservices architecture by minimizing coding and employing a configuration based policy approach.”

Some of the most important benefits of Software AG’s new webMethods AppMesh are its ability to provide organizations with deep visibility into how an application is running and who’s using it/what they’re doing with it; to centralize app governance, and to easily provision and scale across an architecture. Key features include:

• Custom Access Protection – Protect microservices and reduce risk of exposure with advanced user identification and security policies
• Sophisticated Policy-Based Control – Gain visibility into what your users are doing. Control how your app is responding with a range of policies that can be applied at runtime
• Traffic Monitoring and Control – Throttle traffic with policies to manage the load on provider services. Apply limits to service invocations during a specific time interval for identified clients, and log all traffic requests and responses for analysis
• Plug in to the Service Mesh – webMethods AppMesh is pre-integrated with industry-standard service meshes. Completely non-intrusive, it has no effect on service mesh behavior and comes in a small footprint for fast startup
• Dashboard for Service Visibility – Trace the path a transaction takes through your service mesh and understand how your app is being used with the AppMesh dashboard, filtered to include only the services in your application
• Add and Remove Services from the webMethods AppMesh – Add new services and if desired, automatically inherit the policies assigned to all other services in your app. Bring new capabilities online with no downtime
• Automatically Expose API Interface – webMethods AppMesh makes an API signature available for every service in the mesh, enabling reuse across the service landscape. In addition, these APIs can now be managed and governed with an end-to-end API lifecycle management platform

“As businesses scale, their IT landscape and ecosystems become a lot more complex. While the service mesh was created to address network-level concerns such as service discovery, connectivity and security, it lacks application and business context. webMethods AppMesh adds the missing piece to make solutions understandable and usable to application owners and API providers. In turn, organizations are able to create new applications more quickly and decrease the time it takes to get these to market,” said Dr. Stefan Sigg, Chief Product Officer of Software AG.