APIs provide an opportunity for deep integration with existing API gateway solutions across the API lifecycle, allowing API contracts to be published and synced, rate limits, logging, caching, and other gateway capabilities to be configured and automated with as part of the API lifecycle.
While there are numerous other API gateways in the game, there are three distinct gateways that have shaped the conversation over the last decade, and while these are rarely the choice of developers when it comes to meeting their daily needs, there are plenty of three and five-year contracts actively in place, with these three gateways baked into enterprise operations.
- MuleSoft Anypoint Platform - A strong sales legacy landing AnyPoint into the enterprise.
- Axway - Axway isn’t a leader, but has managed to keep pace while still innovating.
- Apigee X -
These three gateways represent the tip of what has been for the last decade when it comes to a very top-down approach to centralizing API publishing across the enterprise, which is still relevant today, but doesn’t reflect where enterprises are headed when it comes to iterating and increasing velocity as part of their API journey.
Around 2015, as the core capabilities of the API gateway began to be commoditized, it also began being baked into the cloud. Acquisitions were made by Microsoft and Google to develop their offering, and AWS got to work on their own homegrown solution to provide these capabilities that the enterprise were needing as a default part of their operations.
area439~API gateway capabilities being baked into the cloud changed the game and began breaking up the API management bundle, allowing newer startups to come in and compete with the legacy enterprise API management vendors, changing how we talk about gateways, and management, but also approach every stop along the API Lifecycle.
As the slow wheels of the machine consumed the API gateway and were baking into the clouds, teams embarked on their microservices evolution, and mainstream business began waking up to the API-First Transformation a new, much smaller version of the API gateway emerged to provide developers with what they needed on the ground.
area440~These gateways have worked to meet the needs of developers who were ignored while enterprise leadership made their purchasing decisions with the older guard of API management solutions, meeting the specific needs you have when publishing internal and external APIs while avoiding the bloat that came with catering to the entire API Lifecycle.
As I worked through a list of 38 separate gateways, this list of solutions is where I started accumulating the interesting ones. The ones that didn’t quite fit into the narrative I’ve painted so far, and provide things that resemble what might define the next generation of API gateways, providing me with the list of capabilities I’ll use as tea leaves for what might be coming.
area451~These API gateway providers are what I consider to be the frontline of the space. You can compete with the incumbents in the space, but the capabilities represented here reflect the forward motion in the space. The trick is being able to read the tea leaves and understand where folks are coming from when it comes to their bet at this layer.