Akana Brings Unprecedented Global Distribution and Internet Scale to APIs

Akana API Platform provides multi-datacenter operation with seamless distribution for scale and resilience

LOS ANGELES, September 14, 2015 – Akana, a leading provider of API Management, API Security and Cloud Integration solutions, announced today the launch of a next generation API Platform offering multi-datacenter geographic distribution and scale to help customers ensure that their APIs meet the needs of their global customer base with unprecedented levels of availability and resiliency.

Akana's next generation API Platform addresses the distribution and scaling requirements of large enterprises, avoiding the pitfalls faced by standalone API Gateway instances. Akana's platform seamlessly shares configuration and operational data for things like auditing data, SLA processing, and quota management. Amongst other benefits, this real-time sharing eliminates security vulnerabilities that other approaches can introduce by not sharing cryptographic nonce values across clusters and regions and so exposing their users to replay attacks.

Akana's API Platform allows customers to create an 'Akamai-like' global API network with a single logical platform deployed across multiple geographically distributed datacenters with features like:

• Logically centralized, distributed configuration stores - all product instances behave identically across the distributed system
• OAuth token distribution - tokens issued by one server are available everywhere supporting customer mobility and load-balancing and failover between data centers
• Distributed SLA and quota processing - manage consumption and capacity for globally distributed APIs and Apps
• Global analytics - analytics processing is driven across all storage instances to provide accurate analysis of all interactions regardless of source or target location
• Seamless failover - if one server or even an entire datacenter goes offline there will be zero downtime failover with no loss of fidelity

"Akana's API platform leverages the latest in modern architecture to provide unprecedented global scalability and availability to meet the needs of today's large enterprise," said Alistair Farquharson, Akana CTO. "It leverages NoSQL (MongoDB), In-Memory Data Grid (Hazelcast), the latest search technologies (ElasticSearch) and a resilient microservices architecture to provide a unified platform across multiple data centers."

Amongst the new technologies we are including in our next generation API Platform are:

• No SQL storage - Mongo DB to support distributed storage of massive amounts of collected data with eventual consistency between data centers
• In-memory data grid - Hazelcast to provide real-time sharing of critical data between instances both within and between data centers
• Advanced Search - Elasticsearch for high-performance indexing and searching of all API metadata, documentation, forums, tickets, etc.
• Microservices - the platform consists of a set of independently deployable and scalable microservices to enable rapid scaling and fault-tolerance

The new platform will be available in early Q4 both as on-premise software, and via the Akana Cloud that will deploy the platform in parallel with the public GA release of the software. Many of the new capabilities have been developed to satisfy requirements driven by Akana Cloud customers and operations, and our on-premise customers are able to benefit from the exact same technologies that we use to scale and manage our own infrastructure.