Layer7 API Management Reviews

I work for a major healthcare company, it's amongst the top ten Fortune 500 companies and we've been leveraging CA API Management to make our healthcare business services available on the Cloud. To make them available on the Cloud and to enable our healthcare capabilities to be consumed by different consumers in real time across a plethora of channels.

We are leveraging CA API Management - we chose it by doing a huge comparison across different competitors. CA API Management helps us to securely consume various services and also the biggest thing has been to do monetization of services. We have certain rules that have been defined where you basically say that this specific healthcare capability is of greater value and we put a dollar amount to it as to which consumers can consume how much and based on its usage and all that.

CA API Management has been the driver for our digital transformation. It's interesting these days, the entire business is heading towards a completely distributed platform where the consumers are everywhere. You have business to business consumers, you have API management consumers and you have mobile consumers. At the same time, you have data providers that are growing heavily. You have data analytics placed platforms and then companies are heading towards providing helping consumers to make analytics-driven decision. Let the data drive the decision so now you're the middleware industry around microservices is facing its own challenge on how to meet the scores upstream and downstream from these back-end services. That's where the microservices platform, CA API Management heavily helps to make sure that you provide your services on the part.

With scalability, it comes to resiliency. If you cannot scale you're not resilient. If you're not resilient your performance is worse. If your performance is worse your API and services are not available.

Fine lines of availability is one of the key criteria's in the industry - 99.99% availability. That means 6 hours downtime in a year, so can you really ensure that everything is interlinked. If we talk about software architecture, quality attributes from these are all interlinked. I would say that eventually, it comes down to your customer satisfaction from there on. So that's our number one goal.

Right now, scalability is our main goal. Maybe they're not the problems but from the standpoint of onboarding a new API on Layer 7, that's fairly simple. I see that it's an extremely user intuitive and user-friendly software. Our operational personnel who have barely have any experience could get on with it and help the enterprise register as many API's as possible from the get-go.

The solution secures your API/Service/Application in a matter of minutes. It also provides the capability for translating services from one format to another (SOAP to REST, REST to SOAP, GraphQL - API, and vice versa). Broadcom API Gateway would provide you 1000+ out-of-the-box assertions and certain custom assertions to meet your development and integration requirements. Rather than building an application in hours through coding the Drag and Drop capability, allows you to create APIs in minutes. The runtime setup allows coding and testing at a faster pace without the need to deploy and redeploy applications for every version build published. Failure if any the code could be rolled back in a matter of seconds and activated. So it provides a good framework that is tried and tested over the years and provided a Robust OOB Security and Implementation interfaces.

I have mainly implemented using Layer 7 API Management. Some of the major challenges we were able to meet with a quick release to market methodology.

Some of the tasks which we achieved for our customers were:

1. Translation service from SOAP to REST and vice versa.

2. API service to DB (Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL, Snowflake, SAP HANA) -- Created Swagger APIs that were able to perform CRUD operation to the backend API mentioned above and provided routes to query and get data.

3. Integration with Payment gateway service providers to perform (transaction on behalf of the customer with third-party payment gateway service providers white labeled with our APIs ) -- Followed TMF standards for payment gateway integration with the Telcom world.

4. Orchestration of the API. Build multiple microservers and provided orchestration based on route, path, and data in the request and perform actions that would be communicated with multiple APIs and provide a single consolidated response.

5. Provided API-driven security (Oauth 2.0, JWT, SAML, Basic, and a variety of means) to access the API giving the developer the freedom to concentrate only on application/service/microservice and let the gateway handle the threat.

6. Seamless Mutual Authentication allowed good segregation between APIs in the DMZ and internal network.

I work as a PG developer, primarily dealing with Layer7 API Management and MuleSoft API management. My focus is mainly on VM management platforms such as Layer7 and Apigee.

Layer7 API Management is most valued for its drag-and-drop functionalities, the available policy options, and the excellent security features. I appreciate the ease of syncing the developer portal with Layer7 and the ability to publish DEP.

I use the solution since I work for many different kinds of domains and different kinds of organizations, including the banking and financial sectors.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from its providing a developer portal to its users. OTK configuration is available with Layer7 API Management, which helps deal with security. The main important aspect of the tool is related to the area called Layer7 API Gateway.

The primary use case for Layer7 API Management is patient services, such as patient care and health care services, where patients would like to check appointment details and reports on mobile applications.

Another use case for the product is sharing the data with external organizations related to healthcare.

What I found most valuable in Layer7 API Management is that you can launch the API from the gateway quickly and securely, making it less complicated to deploy APIs.

I also like that Layer7 API Management has a good portal and dashboards and that the dashboards show you statistics regarding how many people used the API, etc.

I am an Enterprise API architect and we are one of the biggest conglomerate organizations in Dubai. We have a lot of retail businesses,  automotive businesses, and other interests. What we are doing is using the API Management to build out a proper, consistent API layer for our legacy systems and microservices as well. That will enable us to expand our reach in digital channels. This will also help us serve the API Products for 3rd part consumptions.

We are already using Dell Boomi in our organization for ESB purposes and are more focused on that development right now and hope to do more with Layer7 in the future.  

Layer7 is the most important step in our Application Modernization strategy. We envision to create an Open Architecture which allows us to adapt to ever-changing market needs. It is a key enabler in decoupling the core applications from the digital channels thereby giving us the flexibility to build the plug n play architectural landscape. 

We had all those three layers from API: the gateway, mediation, and monitoring. We had implemented that on CentOS operating system. 

After that, we deployed some test APIs for patient-related activities in healthcare. We were querying the patient appointments from the patient database and then passing it on to a mobile app. That was the small experience I had. 

We had this API M dashboard on which and the APM gateway server on which we deployed all these APIs, a couple of APIs only, not much. I just initiated that project, implemented them, the UAT, and the protection domain, and then deployed a couple of sample APIs. After that, I left the role. I don't have any detailed experience, because we were not able to implement many APIs because the site was just starting up.

This product improved our time to market. Because we are a government healthcare organization, we are supposed to expose our patient data to the national command center and other mobile apps. We were able to expose our data securely. That was an advantage of Layer7 API.