Chris Phillips’ Blog - API, Integration and Governance

I travel a lot for work, rough 75% of weeks I am away, often out of the country.

My kids always want to know where I am and my wife wanted a home dashboard so we can quickly check useful things.

I will do another post on the dashboard aims, objectives and architecture but today I wanted to find a way to get my location data and share it.

Like many people I write a load of blog posts that never will be published. This is because they don’t get finished or because my proof readers explain to me what I am writing is rubbish. One of the challenges I have head is how to share an article before it s published in a simple way. I have tried sharing the mark down but that doesn’t show the images. I have tried setting the date to the past so it is at the bottom of the list, however that does not hide the article.

There are many places today to run your APIs. zOS Connect and Akamai are two such examples. Though I recommend that DataPower runs all APIs, if different API Gateways are available then you may want to socialise all of your APIs throught a single shop window. However these APIs still need to be managed and socialised.

There are many types of APIs available, I propose to reference these as flavours. In this article I am going to talk about the three key flavours.

• Resource APIs
• System APIs
• Consumer APIs

Originally published October 16, 2017

To manage and maintain any runtime system, you need a comprehensive versioning strategy. Without a clear strategy in place, how do you know which services and APIs are deployed and which version to use? This article highlights four strategies to help you manage API and service interfaces and implementations. It also presents the advantages and disadvantages for each strategy.

In API Connect 2018.4.1.X the Management UIs do not support changing the owner of a Provider Organisation. Therefore to change the ownership the APIC Toolkit should used, and specifically the orgs transfer owner commands.

To access the DataPower UI with API Connect 2018.4.1.X values need to be set during the installation of the Gateway subsystem. These values are set using the extra-values-file parameter of the apicup tool:

apicup subsys set <GWY-subsys name> extra-values-file=datapower-values.yaml

Important: This feature is only available since 2018.4.1.5 fixpack for the API Gateway. v5C Gateway supported this earlier.

Purpose is to document the steps needed to authenticate a subscribed Application (app) API call using Mutual Authentication (mTLS) with the Datapower API Gateway.

In a Container Service like IKS Object Storage can be selected as the back storage destination for the Management and Portal subsystems. Knowledge Center contains guidance for the parameters for the backups (set with apicup tool) but for clarity here is some guidance on how these translate to the values you need to extract from your Container Service and use.