Enable Enterprise-Wide Agentic Access to APIs
Konnect Service Catalog opens up access to AWS API Gateway APIs
Reason #5 to attend to API Summit: learn more about enabling enterprise-wide agentic access to APIs
This is the latest post in a series about reasons to attend API Summit 2025. Check out the previous post here.
While more and more organizations are seeking to standardize and consolidate their API and AI infrastructure efforts in a unified platform, the reality is that many — especially large — organizations already have disparate API deployments across disparate API gateways. One common API gateway that most enterprises have running at least somewhere is AWS API Gateway, as it is often seen as an easy-to-get-started-with solution for teams that are already running cloud workloads on AWS.
The disparate nature of a multi-gateway deployment causes many challenges for the enterprise, one being the lack of visibility and discoverability of API gateways and their associated APIs. This is a massive challenge for both human and non-human consumers (i.e., AI agents), as both need access to these resources to do their jobs, and it's a challenge to platform and security teams as API producers, as they can't secure and govern what they can't see.
We’re excited to announce that Konnect Service Catalog is beginning to tackle this problem with a native AWS integration that will enable organizations to discover and catalog APIs that they have running in AWS. We include more information in the blog below, but we highly recommend registering for API Summit 2025, where we’ll be running live sessions in person on this very topic.
Feed Agents (and humans, too) with all of your APIs
While multi-gateway vendor deployments have been found to be lacking as a long-term strategy, the reality is that every large organization is — at some point — going to struggle with trying to wrangle APIs across multiple API gateway solutions. This is especially true for the CSP-native API gateways.
Unfortunately, this presents massive problems around agentic consumption of APIs, as we know that agentic consumption of APIs is coming, with Gartner themselves finding that, by 2028, 50% of API consumption won’t involve a developer at all. And that, by 2029, 50% of API monetization will be driven by non-human API consumers. Who are these API consumers? They are AI agents, and they're coming for your APIs.
If they can find them.
Service Catalog is solving the discoverability issue
Your agents will only ever be as good as what you feed them — and this includes API resources. Without centralized discoverability and access to all of the APIs across your org, your agents will be sorely lacking.
Service Catalog has already begun to solve for this through being able to surface APIs that are already under Kong Konnect management and APIs that aren’t through integrations with GitHub, GitLab, SwaggerHub, Traceable, and more.
Now, with the native integration with AWS, this discoverability benefit is widened, making discovery of your AWS API Gateway-managed APIs as easy as spinning up service catalog and pointing it at your AWS API Gateway instances.
Once the integration is configured, Service Catalog will begin to populate AWS API Gateway resources in the exact same catalog where all of your other API resources are catalogged — centrally within Konnect.
This means that now you can simply point your agents towards the Konnect Service Catalog, and they’ll have clear and easy access to discovering and consuming these APIs to do their jobs–and this might even mean making money for your organization (the billing and monetization part of this is something we can also solve for and will be talking about at API Summit).
More than just agentic benefit: Security and governance improvements through scorecards
While the agentic benefits of multi-gateway discovery are especially pertinent right now, there are also very important security and governance angles to AWS API Gateway discovery.
After all, you can’t secure and govern what you can’t see. And you can’t improve what you can’t measure.
This is where the combination of 360-degree discovery and Service Catalog scorecards become so powerful.
Drive automated compliance and governance across your entire digital product ecosystem
Once you’ve used Service Catalog to discover and catalog your API, AI, event streaming, and microservices assets, you can leverage Service Catalog scorecards to automate the measurement of how these various services comply with your specific organization's standards.
You can learn more here, but here is just a quick example:
Let’s say that, in order for your org to feel comfortable with an API or service being labeled as “production-ready," it must:
- Be protected by an API gateway with certain gateway security policies in place
- Have an on-call team assigned
- Have an observability dashboard created and visible to the on-call team
- Have clear service ownership defined
All of these criteria can be leveraged in Service Catalog scorecards. Once your scorecards are defined, they will be used to automatically measure how compliant your service is with the above criterion — ultimately giving them a score that can be surfaced to the relevant teams across your org. And, if the service isn’t compliant enough, not only will it have a low score, but it will also give insights into how to improve that score for quick remediation and resolution.
While this scorecard functionality isn’t new, being able to leverage it for APIs that are discovered from AWS is, and this gives your platform and governance teams yet another discoverability and governance tool in their toolbelt to extend their API governance reach.
Want to learn more? Register for API Summit
We will be talking about API discovery and how it impacts AI and API strategy at API Summit 2025, live in New York City this October. If you want to learn more about the new functionality and how to introduce API and AI governance that is ready for the agentic era, make sure to register.