Address Both Sides of API Discovery with Konnect’s Holistic Experience
When we released the beta version of Service Catalog last September, it was in service of a greater API discovery vision we had for Kong Konnect as an API platform. In March of this year, we moved closer to fulfilling that vision when we announced our new, fully revamped Developer Portal designed to meet the requirements of today’s modern API consumer.
We’re excited to announce that our API discovery vision is now a reality with the GA releases of both the new Kong Konnect Developer Portal and Konnect Service Catalog! Using these two products as a unified discovery layer in your API platform, you can finally address both sides of API discovery in a single, unified platform.
In this blog, we’ll cover:
- What do we mean by the two sides of API discovery?
- How you can prioritize both with Konnect Developer Portal and Konnect Service Catalog
What do we mean by the two sides of API discovery?
As enterprise teams are creating APIs faster than ever using various implementations like REST, GraphQL, Kafka, and more and across different environments, platforms, and tooling, we’ve observed organizations come to the realization — as the problem is actively unfolding — that they’re dealing with API sprawl and don’t have the comprehensive visibility into their complex API ecosystem they require.
The market — and many organizations — have addressed this problem with things like Developer Portals. And they should. But this hasn’t been enough to solve for all of the API discovery and governance challenges posed by this growing, heterogenous API and service landscape.
What's needed is a more holistic approach to API discovery. What we mean by this a prioritization of both sides of API discovery:
At Kong, we have a vision for Kong Konnect to address both sides of the API discovery landscape:
- The API consumer side: To give API consumers what they need to discover APIs for reuse and application development
- The API producer side: To give API producers and owners everything they need to discover APIs and their context to build internal API inventories for security, reliability, and governance sakes
You can think about this using the 90/10 iceberg model, where you only see the top 10 percent of the iceberg when on a boat. This 10 percent might still be a large, important body to be aware of, but the majority of the iceberg is underwater.
In the API discovery universe, this top 10 percent is like the part of the API that you want your API consumers to see. They just need to know which APIs exist, access to API documentation, and seamless ways to test and register their apps to APIs.
The bottom 90 percent is all of the other context that API producers and owners need to know in order to make sure that APIs aren’t going to turn into security, reliability, or quality issues for the business.
Developer Portal and Service Catalog address both sides of API discovery
The key difference between these two products boils down to what side of API discovery they address.
With the Konnect Dev Portal, you can create a branded developer portal for API consumers based on different use cases. For example, is the portal for internal devs to browse and adopt APIs, or is it an external portal of curated APIs for partners?
You can think of the developer portal as the centralized source of truth for discovering APIs that consumers need to build better products, faster. In the portal, consumers can register themselves and their applications to make requests to APIs, see documentation to learn about it, and test it out directly in the browser UI or in Insomnia.
This is an example of a developer portal made using Konnect Dev Portal.
Service Catalog addresses a completely different set of needs in the umbrella of API discovery. It’s a repository of information about services and APIs running internally in an organization, and is able to ingest and provide rich context around producer-relevant data for those discovered and cataloged APIs.
Using Service Catalog, you can answer questions like “which engineering team and product manager owns X service?” And “who is the current PagerDuty on-call engineer for Y service?” Because Service Catalog integrates with various systems and third-party applications like GitHub, Datadog, Slack, and more, it ingests real-time information, providing you with a centralized 360-degree overview of each service.
To help properly and proactively govern your services once they’ve been discovered and inventoried, we’ve released a feature in Service Catalog called Scorecards. Using Scorecards, your platform and/or security teams can set security, reliability, and quality benchmarks (defined in a Scorecard), apply them to all or select services, and track compliance. You can configure a Scorecard’s criteria based on Kong-recommended best practices and industry standards around security, service documentation, and service maturity. In the coming months, Service Catalog will support the ability to customize the criteria of a Scorecard based on your specific requirements.
Learn more about Dev Portal and Service Catalog's respective end-to-end functionality in the linked blogs.
Launch a unified API discovery layer for your org today
Make every API across your organization easy to find, evaluate, adopt, and govern. Try out the new unified API discovery experience for yourself and learn how quickly your organization can improve security, get more ROI out of your API program, and boost developer productivity.
The Konnect Dev Portal and Konnect Service Catalog are both generally available for all users.