What is legacy API management? That’s a question that many organizations haven’t even thought to ask because they don’t realize that the way they manage their APIs is outdated. On the contrary, they assume that if they have API gateways in place to provide security and load balancing for their APIs, they’re already ahead of the curve when it comes to managing and protecting their APIs.

But the fact is that traditional approaches to API management are fast becoming outdated. In a world where the ability to communicate in real-time is more critical than ever, legacy API management solutions can’t keep up, because they’re not designed for APIs that need to share large volumes of data using asynchronous paradigms.

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That’s why forward-thinking organizations should be looking for ways to overhaul their API management tools and strategies. They need to embrace next-generation API management solutions, which can do much more than manage traditional, synchronous APIs.

Allow me to explain by walking through the shortcomings of traditional API management tools and explaining what next-generation API management entails.

Legacy API Management

Legacy API management solutions are tools designed to manage and secure synchronous APIs. Typically, these tools come in the form of gateways that sit between backend REST APIs and applications that connect to those APIs using the HTTP protocol. The gateways manage traffic flows and secure communications between the applications and the API backend.

That approach works well if two conditions are true:

1. All of your APIs are synchronous, which doesn’t always work well with continuous data streams.
2. All of your clients can consume data from APIs using HTTP requests.

Traditionally, these conditions were true for most API use cases at most organizations. That’s why the standard approach to API management is to deploy a gateway, configure some load balancing and security policies and call it a day.

Next-Generation API Management

Increasingly, however, not all data is shared synchronously, and not all applications can consume data using HTTP requests. Instead, businesses want to be able to stream data in real-time to multiple types of applications. They might use an open source event broker like Kafka to stream monitoring data from across their IT assets to the tools that IT engineers use to observe and analyze systems, for example. Or, they might need to stream sales transaction data to a fraud detection engine so it can catch fraudulent transactions in real-time.

For use cases like these, legacy API management doesn’t work well at all. Traditional API gateways aren’t very compatible with event brokers because the gateways are not designed to manage real-time data streams. Nor do they typically support protocols other than HTTP, which is a problem because event brokers like Kafka use their own protocols, not HTTP, to enable communication between servers and clients.

Next-generation API management solutions fill this gap. They operate as gateways that can not only mediate between traditional REST-based client and API endpoints, but also support event brokers, asynchronous APIs, and even apply policies at the message level to support message-based communication.

In addition, next-gen API management tools offer the ability to translate between different front and backend protocols. That means that you could have, for example, a Kafka stream on the backend that is exposed to clients using HTTP – effectively allowing apps that can only make requests via HTTP to connect to Kafka data streams, without having to build support for protocol translation into the applications themselves.

Thinking Beyond Internal APIs

At this point, you may be thinking, “We don’t expose data streams externally, so why would we need a next-gen API management solution to support them?”

That’s a fair point. The most basic use cases for data streaming platforms like Kafka involve streaming data internally – from one set of applications to another within the same IT environment, for example.

But this is certainly not always the case. There are plenty of circumstances where you might want to expose a data stream externally and require the security and reliability protections that next-gen API management tools deliver. Maybe you’re a manufacturer who wants to stream data to regulatory authorities so they can monitor your operations remotely, for example. Perhaps you use third-party monitoring or cybersecurity tools and need to stream data from your own systems to that software. Or, even if you are only exposing APIs and data to internal consumers, perhaps that data contains sensitive PII and additional security mechanisms are still necessary. And, for almost all use cases, being able to centrally expose, catalog, and make APIs discoverable is a major leg up.

Even if your business doesn’t currently expose data streams externally, by the way, there’s a good chance it will in the future. As Gartner notes, “Organizations are improving their decision intelligence and real-time applications by tapping the growing availability of streaming data.” The future for most organizations is likely to include more data streams and more complex use cases for those streams, making the functionality of next-gen API management increasingly critical to business success.

Conclusion

In short, it’s time to move beyond the confines of legacy API management – which means no longer being limited to supporting only REST API management. To capitalize fully on the opportunities enabled by streaming data, businesses need a more flexible and dynamic approach to API management, which requires a new breed of API management software.