proxy

Control Access, Monitor Traffic & Manage your API with 3scale

At 3scale, we recommend using NGINX as an API proxy for several reasons, including its outstanding performance and extensibility, thanks to the Lua scripting support. When used with the 3scale API Management Platform, it’s hands-down the best way to add an access control layer to your existing API.

The following tutorial describes the required steps to deploy NGINX as an API gateway on the Heroku platform. Heroku provides a fantastic, fully managed platform as a service for your application, so the required maintenance effort on your part will be minimal. Since NGINX is so lightweight, the free offering from Heroku will be enough for most cases.

High-level overview

We’ll create a Heroku application with a custom buildpack, including Lua and LuaRocks, and deploy the OpenResty distribution of NGINX using a rock especially tailored for Heroku. We will then use th…

These posts are based on Mark’s presentation at APIStrat/APIDays Berlin. The video is now available on YouTube.

Here is the second part of our how-to on running a load test on your API. In the first part, we walked through the process of setting up your load testing environment and deciding what are the right metrics to measure and the different approaches to measuring them. We also provided some guidance on what tools to use and finally obtained real data points about how our API was performing.

We will now look at ways of securely exposing your API to the public while making sure that its performance is not being affected.

How adding an access control layer affects your API

At this point we have a reasonably high performance API, but what would happen if someone started sending traffic at a rate beyond 16.000 req/second? How can you pr…

Kicking Off at AWS re:Invent – Up to 50% Discount Offer

We’ve teamed up with Nginx to offer the highest performing API gateway on the market. The offer enables filtering and distribution through a unique, full-stack bundle that provides detailed insight into the health of an API program through extended monitoring features.

The 3scale layer enables full control of all keys, policies and users of the API, while API gateways based on NGINX Plus enforce policies live within the traffic flow. NGINX Plus advanced features include enhanced control of data flow, dynamic configuration management, load balancing, session persistence, health checks, monitoring and support.

Secure, manage, and scale APIs with 3scale’s API management platform, which includes an integrated Developer Portal.

The 3scale and Nginx bundle provides unique full-stack support and exceptional performance

3SCALE is now registered as a Technology Partner at the Amazon Web Services AWS Partner Network (APN). The APN is Amazon’s global partner program for AWS and is focused on helping companies build a successful AWS-based business by providing great business, technical, and marketing support. This partnership gives us access to premium support and materials to improve our offering to our customers.

We are also listed in the APN directory as Technical Partner where you can find our API Management offerings. In particular, the directory listing refers to our read-to-use

If you’re like most tech companies, you’ve probably looked at, or are already using Amazon Web Services to power Web or mobile applications, data processing, warehousing or storage. At 3scale we host our platform on EC2. So it made sense to give you the benefits of both – out-of-the-box and all in one place. With our recent release of the 3scale Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to the AWS Marketplace our customers can quickly and simply leverage AWS services for their integration with 3scale. Since our open-source Nginx API gateway is the preferred option of most customers to integrate their APIs with 3scale, we made the proxy available as an AMI in the AWS Marketplace, so now the integration of an API with 3scale is even easier and qui…

Flexibility, scalability and security are probably the main keywords we tried to keep in mind during the API development.

Interview with Vivien Genet, Senior Developer at Jamendo.

Tell us more about the development process of the Jamendo API
When we decided to redesign Jamendo, we quickly thought that the API should be a priority in our planning: first, because it is THE main way for Jamendo to live outside www.jamendo.com (on social networks, mobiles, etc.), and second, because the migration of existing applications (based on our previous API) will take some time.

To develop the new API, we have used the Zend framework (as for the website) but we made a sub-framework specifically for the API to make it easier to change.

API is a 3 letters acronym that you will have seen all over the Tech Blogs and Tech Media, especially during these last months. Why? Because APIs are the glue between today’s Internet applications, services and technologies. They are the key underlying piece of infrastructure for mobile apps, for enterprise software integration and B2B. APIs are currently redefining how companies develop their products and execute their business.

And just as for any other critical connectivity or integration brick, you will want to control and monitor your API to ensure QoS and SLAs. And as for any new business line you would launch, you will want to and need to define, implement and operate a business model.3scale provides a Cloud API Management Platform & Infrastructure to achieve precisely this task: enabling developers and companies that wa…

Proxy or no proxy for your API? That’s not the question. One of the common debates when setting up an API management system is whether to proxy your traffic in some way before it reaches your application stack – and there are pros and cons to different architectures. however that’s not the goal of this post.

If a proxy based architecture fits your requirements the next question remaining is what proxy should we put in place? Yes, there are options, in fact there are many. On one hand there are the closed proprietary proxies offered by different vendors. On the other hand there are open-source proxies like Varnish, Squid, Apache,

There’s a nice article over at API Evangelist this morning on the battle for your API proxy. Lots of good things in the article and nice to see comparisons – while broadly the classification works we see things slightly differently though :).

The spirit is right but the label proxy is a little misleading – 3scale in fact doesn’t aim to be a proxy at all (we call it “proxyless” by design) and 3scale’s architecture works in such as way that it never has to see your API traffic at all or get in the way of calls (no proxies to be seen).

It’s better to think of it as a wholly different type of infrastructure: rather more like a …

There’s a interesting post over on the Apigee blog this week on the role of API proxies for Web App development (“Why modern applications need an API proxy”) and it’s a great opportunity for some debate. (We actually left a comment on the blog – but it seems it hasn’t made it onto the page yet – hopefully it will shortly. Update: comments now back using disqus – thanks Apgiee team.)

Apigee provides a great service and the team is certainly right that many of the elements of infrastructure we see today in the “Browser Web” are emerging and will continue to emerge for APIs – analytics, access control, management, security, caching as well as others such as metering and billing.
However, as you might guess, at 3scale (since we provide a completely proxy-less solutions f…