Design Patterns for Cloud Native Applications

Chapter 7. API Management and Consumption Patterns

When we are building cloud native applications, we can build the business capabilities by using a wide array of design patterns covered throughout the book. Once you have the business capabilities implemented as microservices, you then need to present those services to external or internal consumers as managed APIs by using API management patterns.

In this chapter, we explore some of the most commonly used patterns in API management. We also cover a few API consumption patterns, which are essential in building frontend applications such as a web, mobile, or desktop applications on top of the managed APIs. Let’s begin our discussion with API management patterns.

API Management Patterns

Any cloud native application must have a given set of business capabilities that are exposed to its external consumers (customers, partners, and so forth) as well as internal consumers (other teams or departments in the same organization). These business capabilities are exposed to consumers through APIs. API management is the process of creating, managing, securing, analyzing, and scaling APIs on top of existing microservices.

API management enables consumers of your cloud native application to do the following:

• Have better engagement with the APIs you expose

• Integrate your application with other services and build new capabilities

• Monetize the consumption of your APIs

• Generate business analytics and insights

• Expose business capabilities ...