In the previous article, APIs as a Product: Get the value out of your APIs, we presented a new approach called "APIs as a Product" to maximize the value of your APIs. In this article, we show how to quickly get started with APIs as a Product using the new features of Red Hat 3scale API Management 2.7.
To showcase the power of 3scale 2.7's new features, combined with the awesomeness of the open source communities Apicurio and Microcks, we will design two APIs as a Product and show how we can compose both products in 3scale to get the resulting API as a Product.
Let’s look at the well-known Petstore example. Imagine for a moment that the first steps of the API Design Thinking process led to this rough definition of the customer’s needs:
- Petstore is a company selling cuddly toys online. They would like to open a marketplace to let partners resell the pets. Ideally, orders have to placed through an API so that the whole process can be automated. The partners are split over what they want:
- One group of Petstore's partners expressed the need to be able to discover the Petstore inventory to add items to their own catalog.
- Other partners want to have the checkout process managed for them, from cart creation up to checkout.
- A last group of partners wants to do both.
In the first part of the video below, we go through the API Ideation process to design two products: One to discover the inventory, and one to place an order. Then, we'll go through the API Prototyping step to expose our two products as live mocks.
Finally, we use the features of 3scale 2.7 to compose both products as a unique product, expose it through API Management, and gather feedback from our early adopters.
To get started with APIs as a Product, watch this video:
Note that:
- API Ideation starts at 01:37.
- API Prototyping starts at 08:53.
- The API as a Product features of 3scale 2.7 are showcased at 18:46.