DEVOPSdigest

NGINX announced general availability of its API Management Module.

The API Management Module for NGINX Controller is part of the NGINX Application Platform, a modular and integrated set of technologies to help organizations create applications with performance, reliability, security, and scale. The NGINX API management solution enables infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to define and publish APIs, manage traffic to and secure backend applications, monitor performance issues, and analyze API usage.

NGINX API Management Module is built on an innovative architecture that provides three unique benefits:

- Proven – NGINX combines new control-plane functionality with the raw power and efficiency of NGINX Plus, the industry’s most deployed API gateway. NGINX software powers more than 350 million websites and, according to our 2018 user survey, more than 40 percent of NGINX users have already deployed NGINX as an API gateway. NGINX is also a popular component in many traditional API management solutions, providing the underlying gateway for Axway, IBM DataPower, Kong, MuleSoft, Red Hat 3Scale, and others.

- Performance – NGINX eliminates the need for local databases and other additional components that introduce needless complexity, latency, and points of failure. Unlike traditional API management solutions, NGINX isolates API runtime traffic from API management traffic. As a result, the NGINX Plus API gateway (data plane) does not require constant connectivity to NGINX Controller (control plane). This reduces complexity and maximizes performance by reducing the average response time to serve an API call.

- Portable – Both NGINX Controller and NGINX Plus are flexible and can be deployed on any environment due to their small footprint – bare metal, VMs, containers, and public, private, and hybrid clouds. This versatility means you can use the NGINX API Management Module for both internal and external APIs. Easily deploy NGINX Plus in traditional environments to manage traffic for monolithic applications, as well as in containers to manage traffic among microservices in distributed applications.

"Our API management solution helps teams manage across the entire lifecycle of all their APIs without compromising performance. Our unique architecture is fast, flexible, and is well suited to the needs of both legacy and modern applications, especially for microservices," said Sidney Rabsatt, VP of Product Management at NGINX. "It saves time, reduces complexity, and lowers the cost of managing APIs."

Key API management capabilities include:

- API definition and publication – Provides a simple and intuitive interface to define APIs, manage upstream groups and backend servers, route resources to upstreams, and publish the resulting API definitions to NGINX Plus gateways.

- Authentication and authorization – Enables users to create and manage API keys, validate JWT to authenticate API consumers, share keys with API consumers, and import API keys from external systems.

- Rate limiting – Allows users to specify rate limits in order to mitigate DDoS attacks and protect applications. Leverages the new global rate limiting and clustering capabilities released in NGINX Plus R17.

- Visibility – Enables faster troubleshooting with deep visibility and critical insights into more than 200 advanced performance and transaction metrics for the APIs published through NGINX Plus API gateway instances.

- Multi-cloud support – Deploys on any public or private cloud to manage multiple NGINX Plus API gateway instances operating across a multi-cloud environment.