API Productization Simplified with Multiple Portals in Kong Konnect
Efficiently managing your developer portal is critical in productizing your APIs quickly and reliably. A streamlined developer portal ensures that your APIs are easily accessible, well-documented, and secure — driving higher adoption and easier integration. With the increasing demand for APIs across business units, brands, partners, and more, a single developer portal often falls short for both the API owner and the consumers by introducing complexity and slowing productization efforts.
Recognizing these challenges, we're excited to announce the availability of Multiple Portals and Multi-Authentication functionalities as part of the Developer Portal in Kong Konnect. This powerful self-service feature set is designed to provide customers with the flexibility to accelerate their API productization efforts.
Enhance your API productization with Kong Konnect Developer Portal
The Kong Konnect Developer Portal is a customizable and secure storefront where developers can discover, browse, and test API endpoints with ease. It streamlines API productization with easy publishing, robust security, and automated client registration. Supporting both internal and external APIs, the portal enhances developer productivity through self-service API key management and even offers performance insights with contextual analytics. Plus, it ensures a consistent and branded user experience without needing extensive web development skills.
Your developer portal is where you productize your APIs by publishing documentation, up-to-date specs, onboarding documentation, adding API versioning and lifecycle management, and more. If you’re in the business of APIs, your developer portal is the front door for your developer audience to find and consume your API products. As your developer audience grows and segments into various use cases, managing a single storefront that caters to different API consumers becomes increasingly complex and time-consuming. On the flip side, navigating a labyrinth of overly complex and irrelevant APIs, specs, and documentation induces a cumbersome user experience. These obstacles can impede your organization’s API productization by slowing down API adoption, resulting in lower revenue from API usage.
With Multiple Portals now available in Konnect, API product and developer teams can tailor each portal for a specific audience, environment, or even an occasion (e.g., hackathon or a summit). Segmenting portals by use case helps API publishers organize and offer the most relevant API products for each audience. This significantly streamlines API productization and improves the consumption experience for end users as well. To streamline API productization further, Kong offers a new multi-authentication feature that allows API owners to publish the same API product across multiple portals with different authentication schemes. Portal admins can even set a default application auth strategy per portal, streamlining the API owner’s ability to publish their APIs across multiple portals without needing to think about how to manage application authentication. With multiple portals and multi-authentication, Konnect users will enjoy the best functionality that Kong Konnect Developer Portal has to offer with added customization and flexibility.
Customizable flexibility for a great self-service experience
With the ability to launch multiple developer portals in Kong Konnect, your organization can segment and map different business entities, partner tiers, and/or development stages with different developer portals, based on your specific requirements. This differentiated portal approach streamlines API publishing by use case and provides a well-organized, easy-to-navigate end-user experience. Each developer portal can be branded and tailored to meet the specific look and feel of your different environments, tiers, or brands.
Let’s say an organization has two portals, each designated to two different environments: Dev and Prod. The Dev environment portal is used for testing and staging new APIs, while the Prod environment portal contains only the tested and customer-ready APIs.
Figure 1: Two separate developer portals organized by environment: Dev and Prod.
The separation of portals by environment can help developers manage the API lifecycle in each portal and ensure there's no leakage across the two environments.
Other scenarios under which having multiple portals offers great convenience include:
- Internal versus external: Internal developers would be able to see all APIs and versions, regardless of production stage (development, testing, production, etc.), whereas external developers would only be able to see the fully baked production-level APIs.
- Brand separation: Parent companies with sub-entities can designate developer portals for each brand to keep APIs and any related engineering development separate.
- Partner/Tier separation: A company with different partner tiers can launch entirely separate and customized developer portals, keeping not only the API responses, specs, and docs consistent, but also keeping the branding consistent across different tiers of partners.
- Industry/Regulation-specific: Some industries have strict requirements for which information must be available, such as the Open Banking initiative. To meet Open Banking regulatory requirements that mandate you must provide an external Open Banking portal, you can leverage the multiple portal feature to create a curated Open Banking Dev Portal.
A seamless and appealing developer portal can generate higher revenue, and a custom Dev Portal targeted at a specific group of users or a specific event is a great way to generate new API customers.
Imagine Apple Maps is hosting a week-long Civic Engagement Hackathon encouraging developers to build applications like “Safest Bike Routes Heat Map” or “Most Reliable Bus Route” using new transportation datasets. Apple can easily spin up a Civic Engagement Dev Portal for this hackathon, showcasing its newly launched APIs. Organizers can add teaser content about new APIs that are coming, and invite developers to sign up for their beta testing program to learn more. After the hackathon is over, the admin can follow up with participants, sending them free API credits to apply toward other Apple APIs. This is a great way to not only soft launch new APIs but to create a curated Dev Portal experience for a targeted audience.
Simplified management, unified in a single pane of glass
Our goal for multiple portals in Konnect is to simplify developer portal setup and management. For this, we worked to enable different authentication methods for every API product in every portal. Now, you can set different authentication strategies in Konnect for the same API product across various Dev Portals, giving you the flexibility and ease of defining granular permissions in one place.
Figure 2: Publish Biking Maps 1.0.0 API with different application authentication strategies, per portal in Konnect. For example, require key-auth in the Key Auth Portal, and require OIDC in the OIDC Portal.
Kong’s multiple portal feature has simplified permission and request management on a per-portal basis while still retaining a single pane of glass for all the Dev Portals in your organization.
Figure 3: Manage developer access requests on a per portal (in this case, the Key Auth Portal) basis.
Figure 4: Single pane of glass in Konnect to see all your Dev Portals and key information.
To help simplify the API publishing workflow, we’ve enabled the ability to immediately bulk-select and add existing API products to any Dev Portal in Konnect. This “shopping cart” experience helps make launching a new portal and publishing relevant API products achievable in minutes.
Figure 5: The shopping cart experience makes publishing API products to portals quick and easy.
Productize your APIs in minutes
By streamlining how your organization surfaces API products, you can ensure that end users can discover and consume your APIs seamlessly. In leveraging multiple portals and multi-authentication strategies, you'll get the fastest time to value with an efficient API productization process. Now you can launch a fully functional self-serve portal in Konnect with published docs and APIs in under five minutes, accelerating your time to value and maintaining productive relationships with your API consumers.
Figure 6: Publish your API in seconds to as many Dev Portals as you’d like. Here I’m publishing a single API to all four of my portals.
Drive better API adoption and integration today
With the availability of multiple portals and multi-authentication in Kong Konnect’s Dev Portal, customers will be better equipped to tackle the management of their API products and reap the rewards for their efforts faster.
By leveraging these new features, companies across all industries can accelerate their time to market, overcome the challenges of growing complexity, and — more importantly — enhance the productivity of their developer communities by accelerating API adoption.
Start using Multiple Portals in Konnect Plus today and transform your API productization process.