Akana Introduces DevOps Automation Across API Development and API Management

Accelerates Time to Market; Helps IT Speed API Delivery to Business

LOS ANGELES, June 1, 2015 – Akana, a leading provider of API Management, API Security and Cloud Integration solutions, today announced that it is introducing DevOps automation to the API lifecycle. New capabilities in Akana's API Management platform significantly reduce the time required to update API definitions and versions. DevOps teams will be able work faster in designing and developing APIs, as well as managing them at runtime and publishing them to a portal. The move brings Akana's robust, proven API management technology to the emerging DevOps discipline, helping speed up provisioning of APIs to developers and partners while improving alignment of IT processes and business initiatives.

DevOps merges software development and IT operations in a unified workflow, with continuous updating of applications in production. As a result, DevOps has an impact on the API lifecycle, typically requiring manual intervention. DevOps and continuous integration principles also affect security and operational policies governing APIs. Changes to API definitions that result from new builds have to be propagated to the API Portal. The API owner then has to update the documentation. To date, these kinds of changes to policy and API documentation have been performed through disconnected manual processes that require several actors across IT and the business. Akana now brings DevOps automations to a typical API Lifecycle.

Accelerate Time to Market

"APIs have fast become the de-facto standard for digital enterprises to connect applications and services with digital end-points like mobile apps and internet-of-things," said Brent Carlson, Senior Vice President, Technology, at Akana. "With this new capability, enterprises can deliver continuous innovation with speed and agility, ensuring that new updates and capabilities are automatically, efficiently and securely delivered to their developers and partners, in a timely fashion and without manual intervention."

Key components of Akana's updated solution for DevOps automation include:

• Integration with continuous integration platforms such as Jenkins and TeamCity.
• Provision for appropriate approvals to push updates to API Portal and API Gateway.
• Support for standard API descriptor documents types, such as Swagger, RAML and WADL.

Support for Continuous Integration Platforms

Akana Lifecycle Management's support for continuous integration platforms such as Jenkins and TeamCity can now be extended to include automated API portal provisioning. Driven by an inbound event from an organization's build tooling of choice, Akana Lifecycle Management can route the selected build output through appropriate approvals as per customer requirements. Once approval is granted (or automatically given based on configuration), Akana can automatically refresh the API definition and supporting productization content (e.g., detailed user documentation, updated licensing models for partner or end-user consumption, updated iconography) to the customer's Community Manager-based API portal.

Source API Content from Leading SCMs and API Description Languages

With the Akana solution working in a DevOps context, developers can source API content from leading Software Configuration Managers (SCMs) such as GitHub, Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) among many others via Lifecycle Manager's AnySource Asset Adapter (ASAA) content automation framework. Akana's integrated API automation and management suite supports standard API descriptor document types including Swagger, RAML, WADL and WSDL. The combination of Lifecycle Manager's fully configurable process automation capabilities with Akana Community Manager's rich set of REST APIs enables customers to eliminate the potential for human error during API publication and update.