Layer7 API Management Reviews

• Time to market
• Ease of use
• Strong support

We were able to market our mobile app products with their strong security features.

There is a need for the migration of policies, better reporting, and monitoring integration.

I have used this solution for two years.

There were no stability issues so far.

I did encounter scalability issues. I wish they could extend the MySQL replication to multiple nodes.

The technical support provided is the best.

Initially we were using MuleSoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) before we switched to CA API Management.

The setup was straightforward.

CA has great pricing for gateways, so negotiate with your sales team.

Make sure you involve networking, security, and other infrastructure teams for the implementation.

The built-in routing platform is the most valuable feature. It is easy to use.

There is a need to automate the process of retrieving the SSL certificate when it has expired. Currently, the product doesn't have this feature automated. It is only manual.

I have used this solution for two years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I am very satisfied with the level of technical support.

The setup was straightforward. I started using the product after it was already built-in.

• Any-to-any integration.
• The abilities to bridge messaging protocols and transform data enable us to input/output data from/to/through SOAP, JSON, MQ, JMS, databases, FTP between various backend systems, facilitating business process automation.

We use it to integrate various different customer and backend systems, in order to automate business processes.

• Patching/upgrading is a manual process and should be automated.
• Configuration synchronizing between nodes (installation instances of this software) is a manual process and should be automated and simplified.
• It could use a better dashboard for showing performance metrics (e.g message throughput).
• Ideally there should be cheaper development/testing (ie. non-production) licenses available to customers.

We have used the solution for more than five years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is quite excellent. Support staff usually respond quickly and are helpful.

We didn't use any previous solutions in production. We tried different products in the prototyping phase more than five years ago. This one fits our needs the best.

The setup was quite straightforward, for experienced software developers. Layer7 Technologies back then provided (for a fee) a week-long on-site training for our staff, including myself. Extended trial licenses (longer than the usual 30 days) were also provided for us to become familiar with the product before we committed to buying licenses.

There are now two licensing tiers - Essential and Enterprise - whereas before there used to be only one. Make sure you’re buying the correct one for your needs.

We evaluated some other options such as IBM WebSphere Message Broker, WSO2 ESB, Oracle ESB, Actional SOAPstation, Fuse ESB / Apache ServiceMix, Mule ESB.

Get the proper training for your staff and don’t hesitate to ask CA for help if needed. The product is extensible and CA offers custom solutions. We had some small customer development done for us (for a fee), which was productized in a later version of the product.

The most valuable features are definitely the security it provides and the ability to code to the roles, so that way, when the people come in, they actually have their roles identified and then, we're able to actually distribute the data through the message, to them. Role usage has really been important for us.

I think the device itself has helped us quite a bit. We're able to do things a lot faster, because of the device. Because we identify the policies, we're able to layer the policies that are already written. People don't have to rewrite code multiple times. We write a policy one time, and then we're just able to just drag it over and reuse it for other things.

I've used the device since it was the Layer 7 device, and it's come a long way. I think from a mobility standpoint, there's a lot of things that we do, and we have to create our own policies.

I think the product's getting better every iteration, and they're adding more and more functionality to it, that allows us more reuse.

I would just like to see where it's going to go through the roadmap, and I think it's got great, great potential.

We have been using it 8-10 months.

It's been very stable for us. We're using it as an appliance, so whenever we need to put new ones in, we just download it, implement it, and then just pull over the configuration files for it. It's been very, very stable for us, and the patching's been fantastic.

It's definitely a scalable solution, so you can create clusters in production. What we've done is, we got a cluster on our main data center, and then we've got one in our backup data center. Then we can add on to that as we need to, and use the load balancing functionality to scale it indefinitely, as much as we need for our load.

The support that we've received has been fantastic. We've been able to talk to people everywhere from pre-sales, actual technical people, whenever we need it. Literally, the support team has been 100% behind us. We get stuck on something for a very, very short period of time before they're there to help us.

They've been easy to contact, not only via the normal contact through the phone number, but even through emails, they're very, very responsive to us.

I'd used it before, so when we created our mobility team, with me as the manager, I knew that this is the device I was going to have to put in front of all my services in order to make them reusable.

It was once we'd actually standardized and built everything out, then we made room for the device, so it was just no more than procuring the device, and putting it in place at that point.

When I’m selecting a vendor, I want to look for somebody who cares about me as a customer. I want to find somebody who actually wants our solution to work. I think the team has been fantastic at that. I look at what other customers think about the support and, have they gotten anything good from their support teams? I look at that.

I think the last thing that I would look at would be price, to be honest, because I care more about the solution. Is it going to work for us? It's a partnership. When I meet a vendor, and we're actually going to put in one of their tools, or we're going to use a tool, or an appliance or whatever, to help us, then that to me is a partnership, and we're in this solution together. That's what I really, really got from CA.

The setup was very easy. We just downloaded the actual VM appliance; implemented that. There are six or seven steps that you do to configure it for the environment. Once we set up our load balancer and stuff, it was up and running and ready for us to use. It's very, very simple.

The patch process is the same way. All you do is you download the newest version, put it out there, and then just do those six or seven steps, and we're up and running. We can replace it very quickly.

I did some due diligence. I think you always have to do some due diligence, and I looked at some other products. I don't think any of them met my needs, not as good as this product did.

I think it can get better, and it has over the different versions. 9.1 came out, and it offered some more functionality. They've added more products around the solution to make it better, so I think there's always room for improvement. I think it's been very, very stable for us. It's worked every time we've needed it, and it's allowed us to do a lot better for as a company.

I was doing all B2B integrations. The security features provided by the gateway are really cool. The tool can handle all complex security requirements. On-boarding APIs is very agile and fast.

In my last position, the core services were exposed to the consumers via the ESB layer. They had plenty of issues with protecting those services and keeping the back-end services hidden from their consumers.

Using this tool helped them to provide a unique endpoint, with no change to the consumers. It allowed them to change their services without affecting the customer interfaces.

I would like to see this amazing product have the following enhancements:

• Continue integration and delivery (10 points)
  Currently the tool provides REST APIs, but they are not easy to use. They need to be reviewed and enhanced. The documentation is good, but there are not enough examples.
• Monitoring and reporting (20 points)
  The Admin dashboard provided by the tool is amazing. However, this doesn't allow the service owners to view their services. The gateway admins are always struggling to provide reporting and monitoring status. We need to provide monitoring and reporting out-of-the-box for the management and service owners. We can do custom development, but not every company has time to do so. The Admin dashboard is not business friendly and it doesn't provide rich reporting features.
• RAD - Rapid Application Development - Development environment (5 points)
  The policy editor, at first glance, seems complicated and it scares developers. I would like to see it easier to understand. Maybe it could have a visual drag and drop, like with Borland C++ Builder.

We have been using this solution for eight years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

There were scalability issues in Amazon AWS, but not in the private data center.

Technical support is agile and responsive.

We weren’t using a solution previously, but alongside of this tool, we were using Apigee Edge and 3scale API Gateways. Each one of them is designed for a different purpose. We were looking at them as complementary products and not as replacements.

I was involved in the installation, and it was easy for me.

We evaluated MuleSoft, Apigee, and 3scale.

CA API Gateway provides rich policy sets in regards to XML and REST services. This baby is great for all B2B integrations and it’s a very agile component to set up and use. You can set it up with complex security requirements on your service side in less than an hour. (I am very biased about this. No product can do that at this speed.)

The best features of CA API Management are high quality and high reliability.

It provides a centralized security mechanism so that we can route all our policies and all our traffic through the gateway.

I would like more graphical interfaces for better usability.

API Management is highly reliable and highly available, so we haven't any problems with it.

We haven't had any scalability problems. I don't know how far it can be scaled. We are a mid-sized company.

I would say that the quality of technical support is moderate. It’s better than some, but not as good as others.

I don't know if we had a previous solution before going with API Managment. We have a number of CA products. Some of them, we started with the CA product and some of them we started with other products and then switched to CA because of their high availability and high reliability. We are not looking to switch it. It’s nice and stable.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

Focus on developing a relationship with CA. They have a variety of products and they do a lot of cross selling, so it's important to develop a relationship and figure out how to manage that relationship as you go forward.

When selecting a vendor, the most important element is relationship.

We modified our architecture to focus on microservices. This allows us to have a front door where we can separate and abstract services from APIs. We can use the API Gateway as the entry point to our enterprise. We can actually monetize our services, our APIs, and build a generic integration architecture using RESTful APIs.

It allows us to centralize the triple A functions: authentication, authorization, and audit. It gives us scalability. We can focus on delivery in a hybrid cloud model without exposing any of our back-end services to the market. It's very secure, very powerful, and has a great deal of complex functions that are native in the solution so that we don’t need to write code to do it.

They are getting there. Docker-based containers are there now, but it is not completed, I think. There are still some gaps between what we currently have and what the Docker model is. We are going for a pure cloud solution, so I want more emphasis on the hybrid model; deployment strategies that allow me to have on-prem and in-the-cloud interactions using the API Gateway, possibly even defining extended VIPs that we can load balance across the two platforms.

They are moving forward, of course, as they go away from the virtual clients and get to Hazelcast. The roadmap could be a little clear for us because I'm making decisions now for the next generation of architecture. It's a little hard to discern where they're headed.

The stability is excellent. The product is very good.

Their capacity is a lot bigger than we are. We haven't reached a limit or even challenged it yet.

The support has been excellent for us. We had quite a bit of hand holding to get started as you’d expect with any new technology, especially in an organization like ours, which isn't on the leading edge. We have moved from behind center to the leading edge of technology, as we are using this tool set in the cloud. We are using it with open-source software. We are using virtual machines. There are lots of opportunity here to learn things, and they helped us every step of the way.

We were using a Delphi application.

I wasn't involved. I worked with the technician who adopted the technology. I conducted our schedule and attended all the sessions. I selected the technology for the enterprise. It is complex. It's a complex scenario but it's not cumbersome or overbearing. Anytime you adopt a new architectural model, you are going to have challenges. It's as good as things get when you start dealing with something this complex.

I was actually brought into my company to define an architecture that takes them forward because they had a very large ball of mud application that was a compiled executable, and they dumped it on file servers all around the country.

We’re the largest company in our market and the application we have been using is old. I came in and defined a forward-looking architecture. An API Gateway is the centerpiece of any microservices solution.

We looked at Axway, Forum Systems, and CA API Management. We also looked at IBM DataPower, which really wasn't for us. We had ruled out CA because it was too expensive. Then they came to the table and said, "Why not us?" Then we had that whole conversation. I asked if they could make it affordable, and they did.

Our most important criteria when choosing a vendor is their ability to carry the feature set, to support its implementation. Clearly price made a difference. They reached out to us with a number we couldn't refuse; so they made it attractive. We were about to pull the trigger on another API solution, and CA met us more than halfway.

We knew that this technology, which I've used before, was the best in the world. We just didn't think we could afford it. They made it affordable. How could we pass that up? It's absolutely the best technology in this space. There is no doubt about that. That's why we really wanted it, but we didn't think we could afford it. It has been the market dominator forever, and the API Gateway has the most features. It’s the most stable. CA has taken that to the next step. They know how to use the product. Every time we call, somebody's got an answer for us.

Clearly this is the solution to have, but you need to have an internal appetite for the upcoming technology. It's not a keep-the-lights-on kind of tool set that would enable you to just turn it on and let it do its own thing. You need to have an administrator who understands it. There are so many opportunities to let it help you that don't come right out-of-the-box and grab you. You need to learn how it enables some of the tips, tricks and traps. Put a good engineer on it and give them the education they need. The device does so much.

The most valuable features are reliability and scalability; it's just easy to deploy across our environment. We like those features.

It certainly filled the API management needs of our organization. For example, we were in the process of designing a patient portal for the hospital, and we were able to quickly leverage the UAR tool kit that’s available. The developers didn't really have to think about security, even though in the healthcare industry, security is a big concern. And that was all leveraged from the robust tool kit available in API Management. Taking that heavy lifting away from the developers so they could focus on functionality and we could focus on delivering the secure access they needed, was great.

It's a great product. Just expand on it. I think CA has done a good job bringing the UI component to macOS; that’s good. And I think they're also doing a web UI version where you can create policies. I believe in the past, they had some limitations of what you could or couldn't do, but they are solving some of those issues.

CA is the leader in this space. So we look toward them for coming up with best practices to adopt. I'm not really an expert in that area.

We've had it working for about 4 or 5 years

We've had it working for about 4 or 5 years now and apart from upgrades, we have never had a problem with outages or components breaking down.

We began with just one appliance. Then, as our needs grew, we put in a load balancer. It had multiple VMs talking together, which was fairly easy to do and we never had a problem with that either. From time to time, when we needed to take one server out of the load, it was an easy process; the other servers automatically absorbed the workload. That's a benefit for us.

We had API Management from when it was still Layer 7. Their people were certainly filling a lot of shoes because it was a smaller company at that point and you would see the eagerness for technical support to jump in, be hands on, and help you all the way through. Now, they try to push us towards the solutions and the consultants a little more. In a bigger organization, getting POs signed is not an easy process and when you want something that could take an hour or two hours to fix, now becomes a bigger hassle.

When we looked at this emerging API management need seven years ago, we looked at the Gartner recommendations and then looked at our organization’s needs at that time and kind of picked CA right from the beginning.

I jumped in to the second or third upgrade, not at the initial setup.

I would certainly recommend using this product. We've had a wonderful success story. And we've not had any issues with it. Even when the consultants do come out, they are very knowledgeable. They know the product inside and out and can implement it right on site. That is a plus.

When selecting a vendor, the interoperability between their different products that we have is important, as well as expandability. Additionally, we want to be able to configure the product to our liking. That helps us adopt it.