How to Easily Create an API With Akana

adminMarch 17, 2023

0 66 8 minutes read

YOU ARE READING: How to Easily Create an API With Akana AT Vccidata_En

Building APIs doesn’t have to be difficult. In this blog, we walk through the simple process of creating an API using the Akana API Management Platform.

To make you familiar with the steps, we describe the API creation process from a user interface perspective. where a developer uses the Akana Portal GUI to create the API product. Note, however, that these steps can also be fully automated, for example controlled by CI/CD.

Reading: How to create a website api

Read more or jump to the section that interests you most:

What is API creation?
How to create an API product?
How to create an API product?
How to create APIs The Easy Way – With Akana

First, what is API Creation?

API Creation is the process of creating and publishing APIs in order to make them available to potential consumers. Allowing client applications to connect to other applications is a critical step, both within your enterprise architecture and in its broader ecosystem.

There are two main aspects to consider when creating an API. First, there are the backend resources that your API will expose. What we mean by “resource” is a service or an implementation of a business function as offered by your enterprise applications. Such a resource can be available as a RESTful service, as a SOAP-based web service, or even as an AMQP-compliant message broker. Such resources can also be referred to as unmanaged APIs. Although they provide an interface that would allow customers to access data or functionality built around that data, they lack the capabilities that allow you to properly manage that interaction, hindering optimized use and even making it unnecessary risks.

Which brings us to the second and arguably more important aspect. A properly designed API is consumer-centric, meaning that it is designed with the needs of developers using the API in mind, without compromising the systems that the API provides access to and the data processed by those systems.

To meet initial needs, APIs are published as API products, preferably in a catalog that allows for an effective search and, once found, an easy understanding of the functionality offered and any limitations imposed on its use can apply. Developers who choose to use an API should be given clear means of requesting its use. In addition, the API product should provide all the information to help developers effectively implement the use of the API in their client code.

The second need is driven by the features offered by an API management solution covered. For example, Akana provides powerful policies that can be attached to an API to ensure API security, compliance with all SLAs, and additional protection of back-end systems and data.

Overview of the API lifecycle

API creation is an important part of the API lifecycle – and one of the API basics you need to know. But do you know everything about controlling and using APIs? Explore the hubs and become an expert today.

👉 API LIFECYCLE HUB 👉 API BASICS HUB

In this blog we will mainly focus on creating API products to effectively involve developers, which in turn contributes help ensure the success of your API program.

How is an API product made?

The process of building an API product is like building any other software product. However, unlike software in general, the actual development work should be largely declarative. The process in brief: First determine your requirements. Then design and develop your API. Test it to make sure it works. If everything is ok, deploy and publish the API. And monitor its performance.

It can take anywhere from minutes to months to build an API, depending on the complexity of your API and the tools you use to build it. It’s minutes instead of months with Akana.

Check out the API challenge below to see how Akana makes it easy:

Accept the API challenge. Try Akana >>

How to create an API

The process of creating APIs is straightforward. Here’s a quick guide to creating APIs – and what to consider.

1. Determine Your Requirements

First, you need to determine your API requirements. This is a mixture of functional requirements and non-functional requirements.

Your functional requirements represent what you want from your API. In other words, what business functions does the API expose to its consuming clients; What data and functionality around that data is exposed?

Your non-functional needs are typically a mix of security and service-level concerns. These include, but are not limited to, controlled access, expected (or agreed) API performance, and response time. This includes concerns about privacy and the integrity of downstream systems.

To capture the requirements, consider the following questions:

Who is your target audience – internal developers, external consumers, or both?
How can you integrate your needs into the API?
What concerns need to be addressed from an API security perspective?
What are the expectations in terms of API performance, availability, and response time?

Once you’ve gathered the requirements, you can move on to the next step: the design .

2. Design your API

Next you need to deal with the API design. How will you design your API? Are there internal rules available to support you in your design? Are you going to design your API interface first and then create the backend resources for the connection? Or do you want to publish an existing resource as an API product?

With Akana, you can take both approaches.

3. Develop your API

Now it’s time to start developing your API product.

When developing your API product, you need to keep the following in mind:

Give your API product a meaningful name and a useful description.
Define operations for what you want your API to do.
Specify the data models that describe the request and response messages.

And as an example for non-functional ones :

Implement applicable security restrictions (security policies).
Ensure proper caching, rate limiting, and other types of behavior.

The API interface is captured with a service description language. You can use OAS, Swagger, or RAML to describe RESTful APIs. You can use WSDL to describe SOAP APIs.

The easiest way to develop your API product is to use a tool. For example, you can build your API with Akana. Akana gives you two options for developing your API:

Create an API product that exposes an existing resource (“proxies”).
Create an API product from scratch (and connecting to the appropriate resources later).

You can also use an existing resource as a building block to create your API product.

Regardless of the approach you choose, your API ultimately needs to connect its downstream(s). ) resource(s). First, it will point to these resources in a test environment.

4. Test your API

Once you’ve developed your API, it’s time to test it. Testing is ultimately done in a test environment. However, when creating your API product, you need to make some considerations about testing.

The goal of testing is to ensure that your API works properly under various conditions. You should also test the security of your API and validate any other critical non-functional requirements.

To test properly, your API should be connected to a resource that mimics the eventual production resource. Alternatively, the API can be configured to return a dummy response, which is a handy solution when downstream resources are not yet available.

A highly recommended approach to API testing is to couple your API management platform , z Akana with a comprehensive API testing solution like Blazemeter. The two together provide a compelling complementary API testing solution. Akana provides an intelligent test client (as part of its API portal) that allows both functional testing and validation of whether applied security policies are met. Blazemeter, on the other hand, offers a wide range of testing options, from comprehensive API functional tests and automatically generated test cases to dynamic load and performance tests. Blazemeter also provides a powerful mock service capability to allow APIs to return a production-like response when an actual backend target doesn’t yet exist. Last but not the least, it can easily generate a huge collection of test data.

5. Publish/Deploy Your API

Once your API has been tested and verified, it is ready to be deployed to production. Enterprise APIs, including cloud APIs, are typically hosted on API gateways that ensure expected performance, security, and scalability requirements are met.

To facilitate acceptance of the API, publish it in an API developer portal. You can greatly improve API adoption by providing clear documentation that describes API capabilities and applicable use cases. Additionally, any API security restrictions that may apply should be clearly explained. In addition, it should be clearly stated which “consumption plans” are offered, if any. An advanced API developer portal like Akana’s provides authorized access to API product information and reflects up-to-date API details at all times.

An interactive testing tool will certainly help developers gain a proper understanding of the API and all relevant functions – both functionally and from an API security perspective. Ideally, the testing tool presents the API in a sandbox environment. This allows testing without connecting to production systems or using actual production data.

☁️Become an expert. Explore the Cloud APIs Hub >>

6.Monitor your API

Once you’ve tested and deployed/released your API product, your work isn’t over. You now need to monitor your API to understand how it’s being used and how it works.

Some metrics you may want to monitor include:

Operational metrics such as availability, response time, and throughput;
API metrics such as developer engagement and consumption summary;
Business metrics to validate that the API is delivering business value as expected.

There is clearly a lot of API monitoring going on. Choosing a platform with built-in analytics, like Akana, makes monitoring APIs a lot easier. Runtime traffic is continuously examined, with any discrepant result reported immediately. Suspicious requests can be further investigated in detail. With the added Blazemeter, API monitoring can already be started in your non-production environments, for example to continuously confirm the correct API behavior from a security point of view. API products themselves are updated regularly; Blazemeter’s scheduled API monitoring helps you check if everything is up to date.

The easy way to build APIs – with Akana

Akana gives you two easy ways to create an API.

Create an API from an existing resource. Best for publishing existing resources as APIs.
Build an API from scratch. Best for API-first design.

Watch the video below to see how it works – or read on for a full one Summary.

1. Create API from an existing resource

Do you want to publish an existing resource as an API product? Is a service description document (like OAS, Swagger, RAML, WSDL) available for the resource? Then the easiest way to create an API in Akana is to use this document.

Simply import the OAS/Swagger/RAML/WSDL document. You can either upload a file or import from a URL:

Then click Save.

Your API is automatically exposed in the Akana API Gateway. In just a few seconds you have created an API that can be found in your Akana developer portal – and used by app developers.

2. Build API from scratch

If you’re doing an API-first design and don’t have a backend resource or endpoint yet, it’s best to build your API from scratch in Akana first.

In this example, we assume that your backend API implementation matches your product API interface.

To get started, click the APIs in dropdown menu the top navigation bar and select “Add API”.

In the resulting page, give your API a name and add the target endpoint. This can be an endpoint to eventually test against, or a simulated service endpoint. If you don’t know the endpoint, you can always add it later.

Click Save.

You can then either use the GUI editor to define your operations, or you can use the JSON editor to work directly with the source.

The following example shows operations in the GUI editor:

Save your design and you’re done! Your API is now ready to be reviewed and tested.

Get started with Akana today

See how easy it is to create APIs with Akana.

Select organizations can try Akana free for 30 days. Put it to the test to build APIs and see how Akana’s unique developer portal makes it easy to promote and consume APIs.

Build APIs with Akana ▶️ Watch a demo first