APIs are the lifeblood of modern applications, with literally millions – if not billions – of calls being made and nearly instantly being replied to every day. But what happens when all those APIs have different gateways with different security keys to pass in? What happens when developers have to look through multiple portals just to see which APIs are available to them? And, what happens when the call is made but the response asynchronously lags?
At Gravitee Edge 2024, a three-day virtual event from June 25-27, attendees will get answers to these questions and learn first-hand how an API-first strategy has been working for global organizations. This is the second year that Gravitee is producing the conference.
Securing Kafka streams, trends in API management and understanding API security threats are among the topics to be covered by expert speakers, such as Forrester Principal Analyst Emily Pfeiffer and Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee.
“The world is moving to asynchronous, so we thought, ‘Why can we not be a gateway that does the same thing for synchronous and asynchronous APIs?’ So you might have Kafka in the back end, and you want to expose it as a WebSocket to the front end,” explained Chris du Toit, CMO at Gravitee. “But you want to apply the same things like rate limiting, security, traffic shaping, those same concepts in an asynchronous world. We coined the term Event-Native API Management. And what we mean by that is supporting synchronous APIs (think traditional APIs and protocols such as REST-based APIs) and asynchronous protocols such as event streaming, natively within the API Gateway.”
Gravitee Edge will also dive into API governance and federation. “If you’re taking an API-first strategy, and you’re streaming your back-end data now that you weren’t previously, the governance becomes pretty complicated,” du Toit said. “So how do you do API governance in big enterprises, with multiple gateways, synchronous/asynchronous event brokers, multiprotocol – someone has some WebSockets, someone has SSE – so we talk about multi-gateway, multi-broker, multi-protocol in these complex worlds. There are Kafka silos, all these different back-end streams, REST, Web services, gRPC, all of it, so it’s a trifecta of complexity that’s hitting the market.”
With all that complexity, Gravitee sees the future of API management in federation, which is the keynote for the event. du Toit said Gravitee is working on creating an independent gateway that can sit in front of all the organization’s API gateways and publish everything into a single developer portal, managing complexity on the back end so it’s possible, for example, to manage the same key being passed to five different APIs across five different gateways.
Meanwhile, security is a big concern for organizations, as APIs are becoming the largest attack vector because, as du Toit put it, “it’s almost like this backdoor into an organization.” The event will offer sessions on security.
To learn more about Gravitee Edge 2024 and to register, visit the website.
