API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

• This is an introductory “concepts and facilities” guide to describe the

fundamental components of an API Lifecycle for Discovery,

Development, Deployment and Execution of APIs using an API Gateway.

• It helps to establish a common Lexicon of understanding.

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

API

Portal

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

DevOps

CI/CD

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

API Management Framework

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

Business Architecture

API

Portal

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

DevOps

CI/CD

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

Business Architecture

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

API Management Framework

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

API Management is the process of creating and publishing web

APIs, enforcing their usage policies, controlling access,

nurturing the subscriber community, collecting and analyzing

usage statistics, and reporting on performance.

API Management can be reified in an API Management

Framework as illustrated below.

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

DevOps

CI/CD

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

API Management Framework

Business Architecture

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

API

Portal

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

An API Portal is a destination to attract and support developers

and partners as they make use of your APIs. It allows for the

packaging of APIs as products, complete with documentation,

to enable your community to use APIs in a scalable way.

An API portal helps to enable self-service for developers of API

artifacts.

API

Portal

DevOps

CI/CD

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

API Management Framework

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

Business Architecture

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

The Developer API Portal must satisfy the needs of

multiple classes of users. These include Architects and

Developers at four levels: 1) Business, 2) Usability, 3)

Integration and 4) System.

A principle tenet of the Portal is to promote Self Service.

Ideally, these users will obtain the information they need

from the Portal to Develop, Design, and Test (through

mocking) and Deploy to live Test and Production

environments.

API

Portal

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

API Management Framework

Business Architecture

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

DevOps

CI/CD

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

Generally, software teams that practice

CI/CD use a version control system to

manage code; an automated build

engine; unit, functional and integration

test systems; performance testers for

normal load and stress tests;

configuration management tools; and

an artifact repository. These teams

might also rely on containers for a

consistent software deployment model

from development to test to production

and integrated development

environments to ease the complication

of build and test.

These tools all integrate with a

CI/CD pipeline tool, such as

Jenkins or CircleCI.

Organizations also rely on

monitoring in production and

capacity management, and

tools for these purposes can

be integrated with the CI/CD

pipeline as well.

Many API Portal/Gateway

vendors provide (in their

product) or integrate CI/CD

tools, sometimes making it

difficult to delineate the

functional boundaries of a

Portal, CI/CD and a Gateway.

API

Portal

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

DevOps

CI/CD

API Management Framework

Business Architecture

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

For purposes of this presentation, the Technology Stack and

API Gateway represent the runtime environment for API

execution.

A succinct definition of an API Gateway is that component

providing a crucial layer of runtime API mediation, including

policy management, traffic monitoring, security, SLA and

rate limiting functions.

API

Portal

Usability Architecture

Integration Architecture

System Architecture

DevOps

CI/CD

Technology

Stack

Runtime

API

Gateway

Runtime

API Management Framework

API Portal / Gateway Context Diagram

Internal VA Use Only – Working Draft – Pre-Decisional

Business Architecture