API Connect Nuggets — Consumer Organizations, Applications, and Subscriptions

I hope you are enjoying the API Connect Nuggets series — you can find more articles on the series here. In this article, I will introduce Consumer Organizations, Applications, and Subscriptions.

The essence of the API Economy is Consumption and Consumers. If you build it, consumers don’t necessarily come — instead, everything you do around APIs should always be focused on consumers and easing consumption.

API Connect accelerates API Consumption with various capabilities like API discovery, self-service onboarding, contracts, etc. There are first-class resources within API Connect to ease consumption:

• Consumer Organization: It maps to the setup within the consumer organizations. It could be a single developer or a team of 50 that needs to collaborate to develop an application. Each member within the organization could have a different level of access.
• Applications: It a logical definition of the app (say web, mobile, etc.) that describes the functionality and purpose of it. Each application has at least one credential set — it bootstraps with a Client Id/Secret. An app could have other dimensions like certificates, etc.
• Subscription: This is the contract between you as the provider of APIs and the Consumer. It maintains and identifies which APIs the application can consume and how much calls are allowed. The Consumer subscribes an Application to a Plan inside a Product.

The ability to have multiple developers collaborate inside a Consumer Organization who work with various Applications opens up powerful possibilities.

Hungry for a hidden nugget? — multiple credentials allow you to run an application in several form factors with different credentials and see usage statistics separately for each Application credential.

Are you shopping for an API Connect solution — if so, give us a try. If you are an existing client, how have you used Catalogs, or how do you plan to use them in your enterprise? Leave your thoughts as comments. Happy Connecting!