API Design

How-to: Real-time API Monitoring

Knowing how your API is performing has always been key, but as our APIs become a more important and a key part of your customer experience it needs to be looked at differently. Traditional API monitoring relies on the API and its components as part of application infrastructure. Although this is important it also misses […]

Why Insufficient Logging and Monitoring Can Help Attackers Hide in Plain Sight

I’ve been working in information security for nearly 45 years and started my long journey with punch cards and mainframes leading to today’s cloud and zero-trust. Our world of computing has certainly evolved, and I can’t even recall how many post-security breach investigation teams I’ve been part of or how many cyber incident management teams […]

API Monitoring Across the API Lifecycle

Developers often can’t control API downtime, but they can certainly monitor for it. Yet, sending periodic pings to a service is only one of many ways to use API monitoring. To avoid common API headaches, you can apply monitoring principles across the entire API lifecycle, starting before you’ve written a single line of code. Design […]

TechTalk: Implementing an Enterprise GraphQL Server

GraphQL is undeniably gaining traction in the Enterprise. TechTalk hosts Bill and Aran were joined by Broadcom Technology Partner Arvata for an introduction to GraphQL and an exciting unveiling of Arvata’s innovation that enables gateways to function as an Enterprise GraphQL server and GraphQL proxy. Arvata demonstrated how easy it is to use their GraphQL […]

API Design Best Practices for Enterprises

Your API program will see more success with a thoughtful API design phase. Effort spent on architecture often returns as time saved during other phases of your project. These efficiencies add up across the hundreds or thousands of APIs you support. Your API design should be backed by your company’s strategy and focused on real […]

Gateway Secure Deployment Architecture

In today’s digital world, API gateways are often the first interaction of incoming requests from the outside world. In most scenarios, enterprises place the gateways in DMZ strategically to secure, protect and throttle their internal digital assets. Hence, security for these gateways becomes crucial and they need to be properly configured and hardened.  Whether it […]

Managing the Effect of Slow Back-end Systems

Introduction: API deployments need to maintain a stable network behaviour, with widely varying back end systems. In a previous article, I talked about the need to maintain user experience. In a Layer7  API Gateway based deployment, back end systems that have high latency have some very interesting side effects. To effectively manage a gateway in […]

How-to: OpenID Connect Authentication for OAuth

As we know by now, the OAuth 2.0 protocol was built for authorization, not authentication. It excels at delegated authorization. Log in with Google?  Sure. The OAuth protected API endpoint never sees your Google username and password. It doesn’t need to know who you are. In fact, like a discreet bouncer at an exclusive club, […]