API Federation with Gravitee and Solace

Gravitee recently announced general availability of their Federation feature, which includes an out-of-the-box integration with Solace PubSub+ Platform.

Our partnership has been going strong since they integrated Solace with their capabilities in the area of event-native APIs, and Federation opens even more possibilities to foster the adoption of event-driven architecture (EDA) across your organization.

As real-time data distribution becomes more critical to more businesses, we increasingly see asynchronous event APIs become as important to application development and integration as synchronous RESTful APIs.

Today developers often struggle to find and consume event APIs and other APIs they need because everything is spread across multiple platforms and technologies. Each platform has its own portal or catalog, and its own way of handling access control. It often takes developers a long time until they can start building applications that deliver value to the business.

Thanks to their new Federation feature, users can now use Gravitee to manage RESTful APIs and event APIs from any vendor, as the solution natively supports both synchronous and asynchronous APIs across a wide range of protocols – applying the same API management principles to any API.

Why is Federation important?

As real-time data distribution becomes more critical to more businesses, events and asynchronous event APIs become as important to application development and integration as synchronous RESTful APIs.

One of the stumbling blocks many people run into on their way to adopting EDA is that developers find it hard to discover and understand events, and to get access to event brokers for their applications. Another is that platform teams struggle to meet demand when adoption rises with more applications requiring configuration of access control and resources such as queues.

Consequently, customers often look at their existing API management solutions, i.e. developer portals or API marketplaces, and their event governance solutions (like PubSub+ Event Portal), to improve the developer experience and automate and standardize configuration.

Most API management (APIM) solutions, however, have not evolved to enable the management of both RESTful and event APIs. APIM strategies and tools need to expand to include the management of asynchronous event APIs alongside synchronous (mostly RESTful) APIs. This is exactly what a combination of PubSub+ Event Portal and Gravitee Federation provides.

Event-native applications and services, as well as event-driven integration, facilitate internal event flows within your IT estate – consider this East-West communications.

With Gravitee API Management and PubSub+ Event Portal’s event API management capabilities, you can create event APIs that open your event brokers/event mesh for northbound traffic to applications or systems outside of your organization. This fosters adoption of EDA beyond your organization to external developer communities such as partners, suppliers and customers.

Federation for PubSub+ Event Portal extends the applicability of Gravitee API management beyond Web protocol-based event APIs to exposing any enterprise events as an event API on a Solace PubSub+ event Broker. And as event APIs are exposed on a PubSub+ broker—effectively turning a node in an event mesh into an event API gateway—event APIs are accessible by any of the protocols supported and Event Portal allows you to define policies such as quotas or event retention.

What’s new in Gravitee Federation?

Gravitee has made significant updates to their Federation feature. Federation enables you to create a unified catalog for APIs across any gateway or broker: AWS, IBM, Azure, Apigee, Solace, and more.

Many organizations now operate across multiple clouds and enterprise software systems, each containing valuable data and services. The success of architects and platform engineers hinges on their ability to effectively manage and leverage this complex IT landscape. This introduces significant new requirements in two areas:

1. Governance: maintaining up-to-date knowledge and control of the APIs used in the organization, ensuring they meet the organization’s standards in terms of security, quality, and consistency.
2. Developer experience: ensuring that developers inside and outside the organization can easily discover, consume, build upon, and even configure these systems.

Today developers often struggle to find and consume APIs because everything is spread across platforms and technologies. Each platform has its own portal or catalog, and its own way of handling access control. It often takes developers a long time until they can start building applications that deliver value to the business.

Gravitee now lets users manage APIs and event streams from any vendor, and natively supports both synchronous and asynchronous APIs across a wide range of protocols applying the same API management principles to RESTful APIs and event APIs deployed on other API management solutions such as PubSub+ Event Portal.

Gravitee calls this federated API management, and it is accelerating our joint vision to provide an event API management platform for any type of API running on any platform.

Thanks to the integrations Gravitee offers, you can now:

• Discover APIs, OAS & AsyncAPI definitions, API products, and other useful metadata from 3rd-party providers
• Ingest all of those assets into Gravitee’s API management platform
• Enrich these assets with documentation and access controls
• Publish these assets for discovery by developers on the Gravitee Developer Portal
• Manage API access requests from developers, providing them with API keys or OAuth tokens that will allow them to directly consume the 3rd-party systems, without having to go through the Gravitee gateway

As a result, developers don’t need to navigate to different catalogs or portals to discover useful APIs and event streams any more – they can find them all in one place!

This is just a short summary of the exciting updates in Gravitee 4.5, head over to Introducing Gravitee Platform 4.5 – Federation or “Intro to Federated API Management” to learn more.

How does Federation work?

Looking at your event-driven system through an API management lens there are two main concerns, which are addressed by Gravitee Federation as described in the first section:

• Governance: event API Lifecycle Management requires tailor made capabilities. event APIs are similar to REST APIs but not the same.
• Developer Experience: Developers expect to find event APIs in the same place – a developer portal – where they find other APIs. Ideally even as a component of an API product alongside RESTful APIs.

This means you need three capabilities for successfully managing event APIs:

• Back-office event API management with an event portal.
• Front-office API management to curate and expose all your APIs: RESTful, event APIs and other API styles.
• Storefront – a developer portal or marketplace for finding and gaining access to APIs and/or API products.

All three capabilities are addressed by Gravitee API Federation and PubSub+ Event Portal

Let’s have a quick look at these three capabilities.

Manage the event API Lifecycle with PubSub+ Event Portal

You can group related events into event APIs.

Event API products let you package multiple APIs relevant for a specific use case or target developer profile.

It also adds connection information and defines policies, quality of service and connection details to event APIs.

Manage One Catalog for all Types of APIs with Gravitee Federation

Auto-discover and keep inventory of APIs that are deployed to Solace PubSub+ or other API gateways across your organization. Set up a Solace integration agent and discover available event API products in your event portal.

Review the Federated API and manage additional documentation.

Find and Access all APIs with Gravitee Developer Portal

Whether your API is running on Solace, or any other supported API Management solution, Gravitee can take care of managing requests from developers to gain access and consume your APIs.

The screenshot below shows the Gravitee Developer Portal that includes an API from PubSub+ Event Portal. Hitting the “Subscribe” button will allow any developer to easily obtain an API key to directly consume the underlying Solace event API.

Summary

Gravitee has updated its Federation feature, enabling a unified catalog for APIs across multiple gateways and brokers, improving both governance and developer experience.

PubSub+ Platform and Gravitee Federation provide three key capabilities needed for successful event API management as part of a unified API management strategy:

1. Back-office event API management (PubSub+ Event Portal)
2. Front-office API management for curating and exposing various API styles
3. Store front (developer portal or marketplace) for API discovery and access

This combination enables organizations to effectively manage and expose event APIs alongside traditional REST APIs, improving both governance and developer experience in EDA.