Cloud Platform Support for API Governance

Abstract

As scalable information technology evolves to a more cloud-like model, digital assets (code, data and software environments) increasingly require curation as web-accessible services. "Service-izing" digital assets consists of encapsulating assets in software that exposes them to web and mobile applications via well-defined yet flexible, network accessible, application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper, we postulate that recent advances in cloud computing make cloud platforms as-a-service (PaaS) ideal for deployment, lifecycle management, and policy-based control i.e. API governance - for extant and future digital assets. Toward this end, we overview API governance as a PaaS technology and outline some early results generated by our investigation of a prototype we are developing, called EAGER, for implementing API governance at scale.