As businesses build enterprise and mobile applications for their end users, partners, and employees, APIs are becoming indispensable. Applications have to perform well over any kind of network. APIs provide design time and runtime access to data services hosted in cloud infrastructures. Enterprises are predominantly transactional. Increasingly, mobile commerce and business applications are transactional. Thus, we need API management platforms in order to precisely manage APIs.

We have discussed the various features and needs for API development and integration platforms, and how they assist software developers and integrators in arriving at integrated systems with confidence and clarity. Now, we are moving toward API management and its automation through management platforms. Generally, API management is all about designing high-quality APIs, and then publishing and analyzing them in order to continuously track their usage. There can be both internal as well as external-looking APIs, which have to be search-friendly and consumable. As the world is tending toward embracing the API economy, there are several products and platforms that simplify and streamline API-management activities. The primary purposes of an API-management solution are as follows:

• API design: API-management solutions empower developers and external parties with all the requisite knowledge and capability to design, produce, and deploy APIs. Further down the line, it helps in making API documents, and setting security policies, service levels, and runtime capabilities.
• API gateway: We have allocated a separate chapter to describe the various functionalities of API gateways and how microservices benefit through the leveraging of API gateway solutions. These days, API-management solutions are also empowered to contribute as an API gateway, which is a centralized and clustered frontend for any service user to leverage distributed microservices. API gateways function as a gatekeeper for all downstream APIs and regulate service interactions in a secure manner.
• API store: APIs should be stored in a centralized place so that internal and external users can leverage them. Thus, as service marketplaces, API marketplaces are evolving fast.
• API analytics: With the heightened usage of APIs, it's important to track key metrics, such as API usage, transactions, and performance. Capturing this decision-enabling and value-adding data, and processing it, helps to extract useful insights to improve service quality.

The end-to-end API life cycle activities (authentication, provisioning roles for users, policy establishment and enforcement, rate limiting of user requests, API data analytics, and monitoring) are being taken care of by management platform solutions. These solutions also enable and enhance API consumption by developers, external parties, and employees. API documentation is also being automated. The API-management suite uses caching to lessen the load on services. API log, operational, performance, scalability, and security data gets collected and subjected to a variety of investigations through the API analytics feature in order to understand the service state so we can perform tuning. Almost all enterprises are embracing APIs in order to be online and strive for improved market reach. Further on, the API catalogue is being published in the company portal. The versatile solution is to deploy API-management platforms to substantially increase business agility and adaptability.

APIs have to be artistically architected. APIs aren't just to enable every software package to have a frontend toward integration, they have to be extremely user-friendly. API endpoints have to be easy to understand and use for performing basic tasks. APIs are expected to remarkably enhance developers' productivity. Learning design patterns has to be fast and easy in order to empower developers to create well-designed APIs. APIs have to be designed to be long-lasting. That is, API consistency has to be ensured. API quality also has to be seriously verified and validated, otherwise, defective APIs waste a lot of time for developers. Both API providers and consumers demand top-quality APIs. With automated tools for API design, deployment, and management, better and more consistent results are being realized by enterprises across the globe.

APIs have shown glimpses of successes and are used to fulfil application integration, which has been a hassle for business-enterprise IT teams. APIs are positioned as the proven way forward for all kinds of integration requirements. Besides web and cloud enablement, the process of mobile enablement is gaining a lot of mind and market shares in order to provide any time, anywhere, any device, and any network information and service access. APIs have to be designed not only to tackle currently available devices, but also futuristic devices. There are a number of artistically designed I/O devices hitting the market consistently. Every connected device and clustered infrastructure, besides software systems, is being enabled by attaching efficient and extensible APIs in order to be found and bound to create business value.

There are a multitude of techniques and tools you can use to speed up API-based integration in a risk-free and rewarding manner. As previously discussed, we have integrated platform solutions (open source as well as commercial-grade) aplenty toward the API economy. These platforms intrinsically guarantee the quality of the APIs being produced and used. The quality is mandated to attain the benefits of the API phenomenon.