Zowe and Mainframe APIs
APIs rule the world now and mainframes are no exception. Goran Begic’s Take-aways from the SHARE conference in Pittsburgh highlight the growing importance of APIs on the mainframe. The Zowe open source project is adding a dimension to APIs on z/OS so a few basics will help prevent any confusion.
I work on Zowe at Broadcom as part of the Zowe Onboarding Squad to help users adopt and understand the various components of Zowe. At Zowe’s core are APIs that allow CLIs, GUIs and other applications access to infrastructure services on the mainframe. Zowe provides an API mediation layer to manage these APIs. This is usually where the confusion begins — how is the Zowe API mediation layer different from API management tools like Broadcom’s Layer7 or Google’s Apigee? How are Zowe APIs different from z/OS Connect APIs?
To answer these questions, it’s key to understand the differences between business and infrastructure APIs — the purpose they serve, the people and tools involved in managing them.
Business APIs are used to provide business data to your end-users in a variety of means like mobile apps, webpages or open/partner APIs. Infrastructure APIs are internal APIs used by dev or ops teams to access and automate your internal processes. The Zowe API mediation layer’s role is to manage infrastructure APIs originating from z/OS. The summary in the following white-paper explains why:
I tried covering all the details in this blog initially, but it grew to be too long :) So, I worked with our UX lead, John laPlante, to create a white-paper — Business and Infrastructure APIs on the Mainframe — it’s 14 pages, but John’s illustrations make it an easy read. Thanks to Goran Begic and Gregory MacKinnon for helping with the research.
Learn more about Zowe at this site; read more Zowe blogs here
