API7 Enterprise 3.0 Series: Accelerating Business Growth with Sustainable Ecosystem

In today's digital era, the continuous development of software and applications is crucial for businesses to stay competitive and meet evolving market demands. To address this need, the API7 Enterprise 3.0 series has undergone a comprehensive upgrade. This upgrade not only enhances the interactive experience of the platform but also introduces a significant conceptual shift, placing "Service" at the core of resource management. This transformation greatly improves efficiency in resource allocation and distribution for enterprises.

One notable addition in the API7 Enterprise 3.0 series is the support for GraphQL plugins. These plugins offer developers more flexibility in data querying methods, resulting in more efficient data acquisition. Furthermore, the inclusion of support for the SOAP protocol opens up additional integration possibilities with existing enterprise applications. The introduction of traffic labeling provides finer control over traffic management, enabling enterprises to better adapt to diverse usage scenarios.

Another highlight of this upgrade is the introduction of gateway group release capabilities. This feature simplifies deployment in different environments, ultimately enhancing delivery efficiency for enterprises. Additionally, the incorporation of declarative APIs makes API design more intuitive, allowing developers to quickly understand and utilize APIs. Moreover, token management not only enhances security but also streamlines the authentication and authorization process, providing added convenience.

Enhancements and Upgrades for Improved Functionality

Enhanced User Interface

The API7 Enterprise 3.0 series places a strong emphasis on refining the user interface, providing users with a smoother, more intuitive, and efficient experience. This improved interface enables users to interact with APIs effortlessly, swiftly accessing the information and services they require. As a result, productivity is enhanced, and user satisfaction is elevated.

Streamlined Resources Management

Undergoing a significant conceptual upgrade, the API7 Enterprise 3.0 series adopts a "Service"-centric approach to resource management. By prioritizing "Service" over "Route" and "Upstream," which aligns closely with real-world business scenarios, the system facilitates unified resource management, cross-platform deployment and release, as well as seamless integrations such as application management. With this centralization of "Service," enterprises can exercise greater flexibility in managing and scheduling resources, efficiently catering to users' needs, and delivering exceptional services.

Update Highlights: New Features in the 3.0 Series

Support GraphQL Plugins

API7 Enterprise 3.0 series adds support for plugins graphql-limit-count and graphql-proxy-cache, optimizing performance, resource utilization, and user experience of GraphQL API.

graphql-limit-count:

Data Volume Control: This plugin can limit the number of results returned from a GraphQL query, which can effectively avoid excessive data fetching and protect server resources.
Prevention of Misuse: Through result capping, you ensure that query outputs remain within an acceptable scope. This not only thwarts potential misuse by malevolent users but also guards against erroneous queries that might otherwise strain the server or deplete resources.

graphql-proxy-cache:

Improve performance: The plugin acts as a proxy layer on which responses to GraphQL requests can be cached. When the same request is sent again, the response can be returned directly from the cache, significantly improving response time and overall performance.
Alleviate Server Load: By restricting result counts, you ensure that query outputs are manageable. This guards against malicious or erroneous queries that could burden the server or consume excess resources. This functionality enhances both performance and security in GraphQL applications.

Support SOAP

The SOAP protocol offers distinct advantages in terms of reliability, security, and scalability. With the support of API7 Enterprise 3.0, RESTful HTTP requests can be seamlessly forwarded to the soap-proxy process, enabling effortless conversion between RESTful and SOAP requests without any alterations to the original SOAP service. This integration capability empowers enterprises to effortlessly combine existing SOAP services with API gateways, resulting in more efficient and stable application integration. As a result, enterprises gain the flexibility to select communication protocols that best align with their specific requirements, facilitating seamless interoperability between different systems.

Advantages of using API7 SOAP plugin and proxy:

No need to define conversion templates
No need to write any conversion or coupling code
WSDL URL can be bound to any route and updated at runtime, configuration taking effect dynamically without restarting
Identify service URLs (upstream address) automatically and use them as SOAP upstream without parsing and configuring the WSDL file

The traditional proxy method, either providing conversion templates or writing conversion code, requires users to deeply analyze WSDL files. There is a non-negligible development cost. However, API7 Enterprise provides an automated way to analyze WSDL files and transformation logic for each operation automatically, eliminating development costs for users. With the automatic conversion function of API7, users can convert existing SOAP services to REST APIs simply by configuring the WSDL URL. This general program requires no customization for specific needs and can be applied to any Web service. As a result, it can greatly reduce the workload of developers and improve the efficiency of API development for enterprises.

Support Traffic Labeling

Traffic labeling, widely used in API traffic management, is a technique that involves precise classification and tagging of traffic. This allows for different strategies and decisions to be made in subsequent processing and analysis based on the type of traffic.

Traffic labeling has the following application scenarios:

A/B testing: By labeling traffic, users can be divided into different groups and directed to access different versions or features. This allows for evaluating and comparing the effectiveness of different versions, thereby making better decisions.
Feature release: During the release of new features, traffic labeling can be used to redirect a portion of users to the new feature to evaluate its stability and user experience. This helps mitigate risks and ensure the proper functioning of the new feature.
Performance optimization: By labeling the traffic, a portion of the traffic can be directed to optimized services or infrastructure to verify the effectiveness of performance improvements. This helps enhance system responsiveness and stability.
Troubleshooting: When a system experiences faults or anomalies, traffic labeling can help route specific user traffic to the target system for fault detection and troubleshooting. This enables more precise analysis and problem resolution.
Personalized customization: By applying traffic labeling, user traffic can be divided into different groups, allowing for personalized services or content tailored to each group. This helps enhance user experience and satisfaction.

API7 Enterprise launches a groundbreaking new plugin called "traffic-label". This feature will provide unprecedented control and flexibility to API traffic management, allowing your enterprise to optimize performance, personalize user experiences through precise traffic classification, and gain valuable insights through accurate traffic analysis.

Support Gateway Group Release

In the typical API development lifecycle, APIs traverse significant stages including development, staging, and production environments. API administrators commonly follow a standard process of initially adding new APIs and subsequently modifying their scope as per the lifecycle requirements.

However, real-world application scenarios often present additional complexities. For instance, outdated APIs may still exist in the production stage, and some companies with rigorous launch processes might incorporate an additional testing stage.

To address these challenges, the API7 Enterprise 3.0 series supports gateway group release, enabling swift configuration synchronization across gateway groups. Different environments use different gateway groups as traffic entrances and support releasing one set of configurations to multiple gateways to manage multiple environments.

API7 Enterprise supports:

Gateway group management: Create multiple gateway groups for different business environments, and each gateway group contains multiple gateway instances.
Release process: Publish to the pre-validated gateway group.

Typical usage scenarios:

Isolating development and test environments: Users can release updates and configurations only to the corresponding development or test environment, ensuring isolation and independence between development and testing.
Support for multiple production environments: Users can apply updates and configurations to multiple production environments at the same time, ensuring consistency between these environments and reducing possible problems caused by configuration differences.
Canary release and A/B testing: Users can verify and evaluate the effect and performance of a function in a limited environment, so as to better decide whether to apply it to other environments.
Version management and rollback: Users can choose to publish a specific version of an API or application to a specific environment, and quickly roll back to the previous version when needed. This provides greater control and flexibility to ensure system stability and reliability.

GitOps Integration and Support

API7 Enterprise offers support for declarative APIs, allowing enterprises to effectively manage internal APIs in a declarative manner, regardless of whether the deployment is on bare metal, Kubernetes (K8s), or virtual machines. This capability ensures a consistent and streamlined approach to API management across different deployment environments, empowering enterprises to efficiently govern and control their internal APIs with ease.

Why support for declarative APIs is needed:

Simplified configuration and management: automatic generation, reducing the probability of errors; manage API through "configuration as code" to facilitate version control
Visual analysis and management: standardized structure and format for easier review and monitoring
Build APIs and adjust configurations without coding, improving team development and collaboration efficiency
Focus on business needs and reduce dependence on technology implementation

Typical usage scenarios:

Provide YAML files according to the format requirements of API7 Enterprise
Submit YAML files to API7 Enterprise service via the command line
Configure gateways across multiple countries and regions through virtual machines, and then use a unified control plane to manage all gateways, so that services can be easily released in the CI/CD process to ensure efficient software delivery

Support Token Management

API7 Enterprise adds support for token management, thereby enhancing the security management of APIs.

Advantages of supporting token management:

Security: Only super administrators can view and operate the token page, which means that only authorized personnel can generate, edit, and delete tokens. In addition, once the token validity period is created, it can not be changed, and a new token must be regenerated to set a new validity period, thereby increasing the security of the system.
Access control: Through token management, token permissions can be set according to roles, so as to achieve access control for different users or user groups.
Validity period control: token management allows setting the expiration time of the token. The generated token will automatically expire after the set expiration time, which helps to recover access rights in time and reduce potential security risks.
Flexible Management: The functions of token management include generating new tokens, editing token names and roles, regenerating tokens, and deleting tokens. These functions help us manage tokens flexibly, generate and manage multiple tokens as needed, and adjust token settings in a timely manner.

Summary

API7, the commercial company behind Apache APISIX, is dedicated to delivering comprehensive API lifecycle management solutions. Building upon APISIX, a dynamic, real-time, and high-performance cloud-native API gateway, API7 Enterprise expands its offerings to encompass diverse areas such as API design, API development, API portal, and API monetization. With the capability to deploy in local, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud environments, API7 Enterprise caters to a wide range of enterprise needs. It introduces enterprise-level features like multi-tenancy, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and traffic labeling, providing enhanced functionality and control.

The upgrade of the API7 Enterprise 3.0 series brings forth significant enhancements and innovative features, opening up new possibilities and competitive advantages for enterprise users. Whether it's fulfilling market demands, enhancing user experience, or fortifying security measures, this latest version offers robust support for sustainable business growth. With its comprehensive upgrades and forward-thinking capabilities, API7 Enterprise 3.0 empowers enterprises to thrive in an ever-evolving landscape, ensuring their success in the long run.