Chris Phillips’ Blog - API, Integration and Governance

Thanks to Sara Hagger

DataPower is the gateway/runtime for API Connect. In order for API Connect to synchronise APIs with the Gateway it uses a new DataPower piece of function called the API Connect Gateway Service. When you deploy DataPower in Kubernetes with APIC UP a special log target is configured to store the API Connect Gateway Service logs. However on all other forms of DataPower this is needs to be enabled.

I have reuploaded my APIC Profiler video as Asciinema deletes videos after a week if there is not an owner assigned.

API Connect allows an Application to subscribe to one plan for a product. This is traditionally used to determine which rate limit they are allowed to subscribe to. A couple of years ago Chris wrote an article on how to use this for plan variable to route to specific endpoints. Istio provides the facility to route to different endpoints depending on header variables. This article shows how you can take the plan from a context variable and set it to a header to be picked up by Istio.

This is a very simple task. However one I occasionally get the syntax wrong for.

The scenario is you need to modify the environmental variable of a Kubernetes Pod/Deployment. In order to do this you must edit the Deployment. Once this is saved a new pod is spawned and the old pod is terminated. This is repeated until all pods have been updated. When modifying the deployment if you create a syntax error k8s does not save the config change.

In a few articles I have used Asciinema. I am not affiliated anyway with this tool just a big fan.

It is the youtube of the command prompt.

The service is free (As far as I have found). It allows you to record a terminal/bash session and upload it to their website. What it uploads is much smaller then a regular video. In addition if you want to copy and paste from the video, you can!

This article builds on top of the API Connect WhitePaper, this may be included in the WhitePaper in a future revision

API Connect supports that each component running in its own cloud. The most common use of this is the Gateway Service (DataPower) running in AWS, IBM Cloud, Azure, GCP or any cloud that provides a Kubernetes Runtime.

Your company has just bought DataPower X2 appliances. The datacenter that they will be installed in is remote and you have been asked to put together a plan to remotely do their setup. This article will provide instructions and guidance on what is needed for a minimal setup to get the appliance on your network and accessible via the DataPower WebGUI.