Sentinet is the API Management Platform That’s Truly Agnostic

Whether your organization is in the process of transitioning fully to a cloud-based computing model or (more likely) operating a mix of on-premise and multiple cloud assets, managing API traffic is a complex affair. The accepted wisdom seems to be that API management core infrastructure is based in the cloud, with secondary API gateways at the perimeter of on-premise services.

That model may well have come about (and been perpetuated) because the big cloud operators are understandably keen to charge customers for their own API management offerings.

However, not every organization’s specific requirements are necessarily best served by API core infrastructure in the cloud. Some API management offerings from the big providers are very much designed around their companion services: the Amazon API Gateway is optimized specifically for use in front of other elements of the AWS stack, for example.

Given that the majority of internet traffic is API-related in most infrastructures, it’s therefore highly important that the critical components of API mediation (for example, API gateways) are as adaptable and scalable as possible. The Sentinet API Management platform from Nevatech is a solution to that requirement for flexibility, oversight, and scalability.

Its design is such that it can be deployed with any design of API management core infrastructure and gateway locations — multiple cloud providers and on-premise. It’s a truly agnostic solution that mediates right across the enterprise network and provides centralized management regardless of the number and location of components.

Cloud-agnosticism is something of a hot topic in IT circles today, yet the theory — picking up an application from AWS and dropping it into GCP — is much simpler than the practice. Sentinet can be an independent arbiter of API traffic regardless of how invested (or otherwise) your organization might be in a particular cloud. In brief, it keeps options open.

For oversight into how your topology evolves, the management consoles provide the broad picture, as you might expect. Monitoring and reporting can be localized to specific areas of the organization, subnet, or specific components. The platform, therefore, enables reporting on, for instance, specific customers’ APIs, information on which organizations can establish SLAs with their clients. (The same facility can be used to subdivide reporting and oversight by organizational unit or for different parts of the development cycle: QA & Testing, Development, Production, etc.)

Scalability is one factor that keeps companies reliant on cloud provision, and the Nevatech Sentinet platform also scales via cloud providers’ inherent elasticity, yet it also scales natively for on-premise components. Transient bursts and peaks in demand, therefore, do not cause logjams at a particular gateway, and as the organization’s overall needs grow, the solution simply adapts.

One of the key reasons that API Management systems are so critical is organizing and managing what otherwise would be chaotic HTTP traffic to all corners of the enterprise network. Even with discrete components acting as gateways, ensuring a coherent security policy can prove difficult — especially between different vendors’ gateways. However, with Sentinet, security is implemented centrally, and bridges between clouds and on-premise without any need for fragile VPNs between components or sporadic transport layer traffic pushing updates. As a central management system, Sentinet acts as the arbitrator in this regard, too. It mediates between (for example) on-premise Active Directory policies with OAuth and OpenID Connect, thus allowing multiple identity and authentication methods to coexist.

There are several features of the Sentinet platform that we don’t have space to cover here (please see previous articles here and here, but with regards to an evolving hybrid network, Sentinet offers the best option for API Gateway Management. Nevatech has recently released version 6.3 of its API Management and API Governance software, which now offers enhanced management of shared identities and secrets, Access Rule Groups, and even simpler security configuration.

You can read the release notes here to find out more, and there is a trial to download here. Heartily recommended.