New APInf release is coming
Actually that statement above is slightly incorrect. In dockerhub there are already a releases, like 0.57.0. If all checks out, we will be deploying this to SaaS & other instances.
You may have noticed that there is also a release 0.56.0. And 0.56.x Why is that not being used for anything?! It has all the cool stuff in it! Well, we were testing 0.56.0 and just about to deploy it when a XSS security vulnerability was discovered. This threw all sorts of monkey wrenches in all sort of directions and got us distracted. So we did some fixing and released 0.56.3, that on top of 0.56.0. Deploying that to SaaS and other instances takes it’s time, so in the meanwhile machinery kept on crunching and we decided to do 0.57.0 while we were on a release high.
So what have we been cooking in our lab? The key driver for these releases is deepening FIWARE integration. Fiware monetization module is being integrated to APInf. Or you could say that APInf is being integrated to FIWARE, both are true.
On the technical side, new FIWARE changes provides few more values in API umbrella side: IDP App ID and few settings from sub URL requests:
This integration also needed some additional logging functionality which has been implemented.
It has been a while since we did our last big release. We are still a small company and we do customer projects. These projects take some of our effort but we have resources working on the platform all the time. Most of the changes have been under the hood, so we delayed the release a bit. There is a new piece of stats that we wanted to give a go:
This approach should give users better grasp of API response. Plus it looks pretty. There are also other changes, like for monitoring:
plus bunch of other stuff, which you can find in the release notes.
And after this? Well there are grand things cooking. On the surface most visible change planned is the “next”. Next changes the UI and UX flow for the better. During last year we were just piling up features on top of each other and if you keep on doing that, things will get out of hand fast. Next is not ready yet, but you can go and take a look. Feedback is always appreciated.
Then there is the iceberg floating under the surface: Proxy42. We have two geniuses locked up working on this. Proxy42 is a new (duh) proxy. For those who are not familiar what a proxy is or what APInf platform architecture looks like, here is a quick explanation: on top there is a management layer, the one that you see on the browser. Under that management layer is the heart of the API management: proxy. Proxy relays all the traffic. Without it there would be no API management. We have been using API umbrella for some time now, and even as it has served our purposes quite nicely, we have hit some limitations. One of them is the x-api-key based architecture which we will likely leave behind in the future.
One thing contributing to the decision to develop our own proxy was the speed and priority of development. We have forked API umbrella, as we needed some functionality that was not there. Funnily enough, the instability of Trump administration has been contributing into this. API umbrella is an NREL project. Trump’s planned cuts gave us another reason to develop our own solution.
After those two, things are bit more open. Deeper and more fine grained monetization and contracting between API owners and consumers seem like the next things to work on, but let us see.
BTW; We discussed here that we’d nickname our coming releases. I think we’ll call 0.57.0 “Vesa”.
The writer is a fresh product owner for APInf. APInf helps organizations to participate in API Economy, and we help APIs and Application developers with our API Management platform.
