The InterSystems API Manager (IAM) enables you to monitor and control traffic to and from your web-based APIs. If you are building service-oriented application layers, you are very likely to find the number of APIs you are using quickly rise. The more distributed your environment the more critical it becomes to properly govern and monitor your API traffic. The API Manager enables you easily route all your traffic through a centralized gateway and forward API request to appropriate target nodes.
As you might have heard, we just introduced the InterSystems API Manager (IAM); a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, enabling you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement.
In this article, I will show you how to set up IAM and highlight some of the many capabilities IAM allows you to leverage.
In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.
While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:
Writing code
REST-enabling it
Documenting it (as a REST API)
Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.
This is advantageous because:
You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec
I am happy to announce that InterSystems API Manager is now generally available. InterSystems API Manager (IAM) is a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, enabling you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure.
In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations deploying mission-critical applications must implement robust security architectures that protect sensitive data while maintaining high availability and performance. This is especially crucial for enterprises utilizing advanced database management systems like InterSystems IRIS, which often powers applications handling highly sensitive healthcare, financial, or personal data.
With my basic knowledge of Docker container and REST API, I would like to have my first try on using InterSystems API manager to take control of APIs and microservices. I have completed this online course using my local IRIS instance as host (Windows OS) and IAM running on a Linux VM (guest).
InterSystems API Management (IAM) - a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, enables you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement. And here's an article explaining how to start working with IAM.
In this article, we would use InterSystems API Management to Load Balance an API.
In our case, we have 2 InterSystems IRIS instances with /api/atelier REST API that we want to publish for our clients.
There are many different reasons why we might want to do that, such as:
Load balancing to spread the workload across servers
Blue-green deployment: we have two servers, one "prod", other "dev" and we might want to switch between them
Canary deployment: we might publish the new version only on one server and move 1% of clients there
The GA release is now published for the 1.5 version of the InterSystems API Manager (IAM).
The container for IAM, including all relevant artifacts to upgrade from earlier versions of IAM can be downloaded from the WRC Software Distribution site in the Components area.
The build number for this release is IAM 1.5.0.9-4.
InterSystems API Manager 1.5 makes it easier to manage your API traffic, integrate with your environment and onboard users of your APIs. It has many new capabilities, including:
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REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) is a standardized way for web applications to communicate with each other using HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. It's designed around resources, which can be anything from a user to a file.
Using Flask, REST API, and IAM with InterSystems IRIS
Part 3 – IAM
InterSystems API Manager (IAM) is a component that allows you to monitor, control, and manage traffic from HTTP-based APIs. It also acts as an API gateway between InterSystems IRIS applications and servers.
InterSystems API Manager (IAM) version 3.2.1 is now Generally Available. In additional to bug fixes and minor improvements IAM 3.2 adds new plug-ins that might be of interest to IRIS customers.
This new plugin allows you to reduce the risk of XML attacks by checking the structure of XML payloads. This validates maximum complexity (depth of the tree), maximum size of elements and attributes.
A few weeks ago I published an API accelerator call Memoria, Is a very simple way to minimize the time and network traffic to and end-point, I hope could be useful.
Watch as the presenter uses IKO to deploy the WebGateway, SAM, and InterSystems API Manager with the latest version of the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator:
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IAM - InterSystems API Manager is a great tool for monitoring your traffic. If you are trying to use it in your Kubernetes cluster you may have tried doing a deployment similar to this one:
The GA release is now published for the 2.3 version of the InterSystems API Manager (IAM).
The container for IAM, including all relevant artifacts to upgrade from earlier versions of IAM can be downloaded from the WRC Software Distribution site in the Components area.
The build number for this release is IAM 2.3.3.2-1.
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Using Flask, REST API, and IAM with InterSystems IRIS
Part 2 – Flask App
Flask is a web development microframework written in Python. It is known for being simple, flexible, and enabling rapid application development.
Installing Flask is very simple. Once you have python installed correctly on your operating system, we need to install the flask library with the pip command. For REST API consumption, it is advisable to use the requests library. The following link provides a guide to installing flask: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/installation/
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Using SOAP Web Services or REST API Resources, if you want to deliver strategic digital assets for your organization, SOA aproach is an excellent option. The InterSystems IRIS supports like a charm the SOA principles with Contract First technique to model services aligned with the business, and create the services from the service contracts (Open API or WSDL).
InterSystems API Manager (IAM) version 2.8.1 is now Generally Available. In addition to a spade of performance improvements and bug fixes, this release adds significant new functionality, including:
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