SubscribeApp: Mashery API Management & API Analytics
Published by cornelius on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in Applications.Tags: mashery, web service brokers
A tremendously useful service provider.
Web services, also known as APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), are components used access to your data and services. Mashery provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) infrastructure for supporting a company’s API through management, monitoring, access control, and monetization. We provide all of the infrastructure you need to help your company control who has programmatic access to you data, and to put a business model in place that supports your revenue goals.
By publishing your API, you give potential and existing partners the ability to create applications that use your data and engage customers in new ways. There is no one way to use an API to gain business advantage.
[Source: http://www.mashery.com/solution/]
For many technology startups I would not consider using Mashery because most APIs are too domain specific, quickly evolving and you want to keep full control on the schema and don’t be forced to map it to their system in any way.
P.S. For a study paper I wrote about domain-specific web service brokers and recognized that they provide good business opportunities these days. Along the lines, there are more and more services sitting on top of the Amazon Web Services platform providing additional management and administration functionalities.
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March 18th, 2009 at 1:50 am
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March 18th, 2009 at 7:28 am
Hi Cornelius,
Thanks for the mention!
Just to clarify, Mashery’s services have been designed from the very beginning to be 100% transparent. No code modifications or “binding” of any kind is required to leverage the Mashery solution. Some configuration steps during implementation through our management dashboard and a bit of DNS fu, and you’re up and running under Mashery.
Best,
Clay Loveless
Mashery Co-founder and Chief Architect
March 18th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Thanks Clay, I will definitely take a closer look at the Mashery platform. Good to hear that you see clear transparency and amount of required code modifications as important selling arguments for your services.
Cornelius.
March 26th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Thanks for clarifying, Clay…and thanks for talking about us, Cornelius!
This brings up an interesting point, and an ongoing conversation we’ve been having for almost three years now. I usually describe an API as having two parts:
1. the domain-specific stuff that actually IS the API (which is usually the same set of services that power a company’s own website, or that have been previously made available privately to other partners for ‘integration’); and
2. the management layer, that does things like key issuance, self-provisioning, rate limiting, throttling, method usage rule enforcement, reporting, etc.
Clay and the rest of the team at Mashery have done a great job in building a system that in almost all cases can do everything necessary for #2 without needing to make modifications to #1. It turns out that the set of services needed for #2, if done right, are independent of what #1 is doing and how it’s architected. So the same multi-tenant system that runs Netflix’s API can also run Best Buy’s and the New York Times’s.
In Mashery’s early days, we considered an approach that would try to “normalize” API calls across services providing similar capabilities, but quickly rejected that as a “lowest common denominator” approach. That was the right decision, and after nearly three years of development and dozens of implementations we have created a system that has immense flexibility – but is still very straightforward to implement.
Cheers -
Oren Michels
Co-Founder & CEO
Mashery