Hi,
from my perspective we need to look at two different dimensions:
1)
Technical Requirements/Security for the component exposing the APIs (API Gateway)
2) API Management / Product Lifecycle / Developer Engagement
On 1) I see API Gateways becoming more and more commodity over the last 5 years. It started to be a very specialised component only available from a small list of vendors. This changed and if you e.g. have a look at public cloud providers like e.g. AWS, you find very competitive API GW implementations these day. Also vendors like Huawei, Oracle habe beefed up their stack in the meantime. Hence the optimal technical choice depends on where you are running your services.
On2) APIs are a unique business. APIs needs to be understood as Product. Developers as Customers. APIs need to balance between being generic/reusable and actually useful. Here it is good to have an expert team understanding this and actual taking care of it.
So depending on your situation, you might be able to source from internal (team + tech component) or seek support of an service provide.
At the time we decided for the later, which still allows you to host the GW on prem.
Best,
Stefan
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Stefan Christoph
Principal Systems Architect
Vodafone Group
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-04-2017 00:46
From: Gerry Winsor
Subject: Service Partners for APIs
Hi Ruediger,
This was tried (slightly different scope!) as part of the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) initiative; while WAC had some "commercial" issues, however it did utilize an 'API Gateway out-sourced to a 3rd Party' integration model, which did work and did expose "open APIs".
Answering your question: Should a carrier select a service partner for their APIs as the master contact / gateway to avoid conflicts and security issues? ... this deployment model has been proven to work, but is heavily dependent on the out-sourcing/service partner contract and how the Service Partner's API Gateway integrates with the Operators back-end functionality - that implements the API-exposed functionality. And while WAC worked (technically), it isn't a terribly good show case.
Regards,
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Gerry Winsor
DXC Technology
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