3scale Unfurls Free API Management Service in the Cloud

2015 Tech Trends: A Critical Crossroad for IT

Application developers these days are creating a major IT management challenge by firing up new application programming interfaces (APIs) that need to be managed. To help bring some order to that chaos, 3scale today launched APIcast, a free API gateway service that IT organizations can use to support as many as 50,000 API transactions a day.

3scale CEO Steve Willmott says that at 50,000 transactions per day, APIcast should be able to meet the needs of most small-to-medium-sized developers. The reason that the service is free is that, all too often, organizations launch an API without putting any API management system in place. APIcast is intended to reduce that occurrence by making it easier for organizations to invoke a free service up until the point that they drive enough traffic to warrant paying for an API management platform capable of supporting a higher volume of transaction, says Willmott.

In general, enterprise IT organizations are deploying more APIs as an alternative to traditional SOAP-based Web services technologies that are harder to configure and manage. The challenge, of course, is that because RESTful APIs are, for example, easier to set and consume, the ongoing management of what can become hundreds, even thousands, of APIs escalates quickly.

In addition, Willmott notes that discovering all those APIs is a significant challenge, which is the primary reason 3Scale also now offers an API search facility.

As is often the case in IT, no good thing comes without some form of punishment. In the case of APIs, that punishment is a potential management and security headache that most IT organizations have yet to completely think through, even as the so-called API economy begins to mushroom. In the meantime, 3scale is betting that once they do, they’ll find that, more often than not, they are already employing a range of existing free API management services from 3scale.