2016 Software Trends: The Evolution of Enterprise Software
In a move that could considerably expand adoption of application programming interface (API) management platforms, Red Hat this week announced it is acquiring 3Scale.
Mike Piech, vice president and general manager of middleware at Red Hat, says one of the first things Red Hat will do once the acquisition closes is make the API management software developed by 3Scale available as open source code. Red Hat plans to make an on-premise version of the 3Scale API management software available as well. The API management software currently provided by 3Scale is available as a service.
Red Hat also plans to tighten the integration between the 3Scale API management platform and its own OpenShift platform-as-a-service environment, JBoss Middleware, as well as the FeedHenry mobile application development platform (MADP) that Red Hat acquired last year. Together, Piech says, the offerings will create a spectrum of hybrid services that IT organizations will be able to use to integrate both external and internal APIs.
3Scale CEO Steve Willmott says that while the number of public APIs has been increasing at a steady rate, the number of private APIs being created is exploding, thanks in part to the rise of microservices architectures based on containers such as Docker. Most of those internal API deployments, however, currently lack a centralized approach to managing them. As a result, many IT organizations today don’t really have a firm grasp of how those APIs are being consumed, says Willmott.
Whether it’s a digital business initiative or an effort to create a software-defined data center, just about every major IT initiative these days is dependent on the existence of well-defined APIs. The challenge IT organizations will face as those APIs proliferate will be keeping track of all the application dependencies on those APIs and then secondarily managing the lifecycle of an API like they would any application. That means instead of crafting APIs that get forgotten, IT organizations will need a much more disciplined approach to managing APIs that will soon be just about everywhere IT can be found.
