Rethinking the API Market Product and Solutions
Tags: apigateway, business, api
Published: 2023-09-05 21:42:49

![API Evolution outlook](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/pabepuwwl2hyllvgr9gx.gif)
When we think about the API Market since the 2000s, it passes like a movie into our head, with well-defined epilogs. Since the API REST principle came, many innovations have been boosted overnight. The capacity to integrate business and people could be more challenging than it is nowadays.

![API adoption evolution](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xo9zu82cg8nsrcvolzrq.png)


Recently, I read a fascinating post on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7100702710663942144/, where the term "Gatewaysaurus" is mentioned. In 2023, organizations are still dealing with legacy solutions or cumbersome products that imply ultra-complex environments where the effort to keep things running is indeed a nightmare. 


## Background

As I came from a Middleware technologies background, I had a chance to see the API market born and also had the opportunity to work with several important players in that industry(Red Hat, MuleSoft, WSO2, etc.), regardless of any hype, what I can see that the significant innovation recently was the concept of GraphQL, which dramatically helps developers to create rich web SPA/UIs with less HTTP requests (BFF Pattern), in despite of the fact that it's a fundamental paradigm of consistent software architecture, the Async APIs are emerging as an interesting promising yet, with all that said, what can be the next big thing in the API Industry? Well, I have my bet, and I will share this in the following sections here.
 
## Current Problems

When we map the deployed products in the industry right now, we can notice the following stereotypes: 

* Legacy Solutions - Monolith or quite old solutions, hard to scale in an elastic infrastructure fashion 
* Locked-in solutions - Usually, the API gateways provided by Cloud Providers
* Over-complex solutions - Products tied to the Kubernetes environments have become increasingly complex for some customers. 

![Current API Products Problems](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/trvyaeteu6xp7vlnqx06.gif)

## Our Approach

For modern API scenarios, we believe the keyword is "multi," so we have created a solution to manage several API Gateways using the simple concept of **_drivers_**. Each driver is intended to implement standard capabilities such as deployment, monitoring, and API Lifecycle. 

![Our Approach](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/28iodtj8mc7bdi8id7r0.gif)

Other significant issues with the current solutions are:

* Locked-in IDP solutions for token generation
* To address the API marketplaces as a strong business driver inside the organizations 

Those aspects and several others were the big motivations for creating a "not yet another" API Product. We are pushing for a new trend and product category: **API Orchestrator**, whose primary goal is to act as a control plane for multiple API Gateways, and many Identity Providers can be integrated and work together simultaneously.

## Introducing QriarLabs API Platform - QAP 

At QriarLabs, we combined several Apache licensing-based products to build a solution to address the pain points mentioned here; in addition, we added incredible new capabilities, such as: 

- Migration's Tools 
- Current Support for KrakenD API Gateway and advanced stage for AWS API-GW Kong, APISix, and WSO2 drivers. 
- Support for Keycloak, WSO2 IS, Okta, Auth0 as IdPs
- APIOps 
- Deploy APIs right from Open API Spec
- Etc

If you want to know more about the solution and how we could help you, please feel free to reach us at https://qriarlabs.com/contact/