Ask HN: Best API Management Platform?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14213874

by wslh • 9 years ago

3 8 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We are right now focused on building a specific API for an MVP but don't want to spend time building a web portal to manage users, API credentials, and payments. We want to only focus in the back-end.

Is there a simple and good API management platform for doing this? I looked at apigee, 3scale, etc but they seem to offer something more complex. I don't know if https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/ is just this. I am assuming that third parties can subscribe to my API and pay us through the system as well.

picsoung4• 9 years ago

Hi :) Disclaimer: I work for 3scale.

The 3scale solution is pretty easy to install on your existing API.

3scale offers an API Gateway that could cloud-hosted or self-hosted. The API Gateway will sit in front of your existing API and will enforce the rules you would have setup in 3scale.

On 3scale backend, you have settings to answer the following questions regarding your API: - what's the auth mechanism? API key, a pair of keys, oAuth? - what is the rate limiting in place? on the whole API, on a specific endpoint - what are the different user personas? Free Hacker plan vs. Business partner with high SLA - what is the price to use the API? free, flat fee, per per request, pay per 1000s requests.. - How is the Developer Experience? Having a Developer portal in place.

It's very flexible, and you can go really deep in the configuration. But you are right, it may seem overwhelming at first. Think big ;) Having this API management solution in place when you have only one or two people using it, will help you start of a good base, and when you are ready to grow, everything will be there already.

Also... think about the amount of time you will spend building a custom solution vs. the amount of time you should spend improving the API itself.

Feel free to reach out if you want to continue the conversation :) nicolas@3scale.net

wslh3• 9 years ago

Thanks! What about the payment subscription by customers? Is it handled via 3scale?

picsoung4• 9 years ago

Yes, users are asked to put their credit card credentials, and then we generate an invoice, and charge their cards.

We use Stripe, Ogone, Braintree or Adyen as payment providers, and money goes directly into your account, we don't take any cut.

passenger• 9 years ago

Hi,

I've been looking for something similar for a while. My best find so far is https://github.com/NREL/api-umbrella

Ask HN: Best API Management Platform?

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