API Gateway
Overview
Digital customers want seamless experiences across channels, platforms, and devices. The interactions on these channels rely on the organization’s information management system. Rapid adoption of micro services architecture has led to distributed information systems, and companies are turning to Application Program Interface (API) Gateways to effectively manage their service portfolios and access the right information easily.
Enabling the Digital Insurance Business with API based architecture
The McCamish Approach to APIs
The goal of Infosys McCamish is to publish its platform’s APIs in a standard and proficient way to its clients, where every client can access the McCamish environment based on their system requirements.
We use the WSO2 API Manager tool based on WSO2 carbon platform for managing McCamish APIs. This includes:
Empowers API developers to manage the McCamish APIs for consumers. Enables designing, prototyping, backend integration, and publishing the APIs while also accounting for access control, mediation, versioning, and blocking
Supported by the swagger tool, API store enable consumers to search and view the published APIs from McCamish based on their subscription levels.
Helps manage internal and external service users, and their roles. The interface can be used to integrate with other user stores, identity providers, and view lifecycle stages of all APIs.
Maintains and authenticate access tokens issued to the user.
Regulates traffic to the API Gateway by managing service levels based on subscription tiers. Based on the service levels, it validates the throttling policy on each request, and provides a verdict to API gateway.
Working on OAuth2 OpenID connect protocol, API Gateway is the central component on API management and acts like a proxy of different API endpoints. In addition, API gateway uses different handlers for throttling, and analytics for the API calls and route them to the respective API back ends, executing the mediation logic, if applicable. Along with API gateway, McCamish uses API Analytics to monitor APIs and analyze usage patterns.
Benefits of McCamish API Gateway
- Provides a single point of entry for all micro-services
- Separates external public APIs from internal microservice APIs
- Prevents cyber-attacks by adding an additional layer of security to microservices
- Enables support for mixing communication protocols
- Provides visibility into performance and availability of the app
- Allows throttling to control the usage of APIs by consumers
Role of APIs in the McCamish product roadmap
Infosys McCamish has been implementing micro-services architecture for our products that serve 35+ clients in the insurance space. A growing demand to integrate with the McCamish ecosystem, multiple micro-services deployed as distributed services, and need for a singlepoint of entry into the system has made the API Gateway one of the most important components in McCamish product roadmap.
We currently use system, experience, and partner APIs for development in our products such as VPAS Web®, Self-service portal, and Agent portal. Clients also consume these into their own ecosystem.
System APIs
Connect the core business systems directly to the API gateway with the methods directly exposed to the clients. The consumers have to understand proper input and output parameters and same API method can be used for different functionalities.
Experience APIs
APIs are exposed using representational state transfer (REST) standards with proper resource naming strategy and defined verbs for better user experience. There can be further hierarchy to the resources, based on the collection of resources, for example, Policies API can have further hierarchies such as billing, financial history, to fetch a particular information of the policy etc.
Partner APIs
Built on the top of experience APIs or specifically designed for a particular client’s system requirement. The clients may need such APIs for integration of their own systems or third party systems, which are looking for a specific type of input-output formats.
With clients developing new product lines on technologies such as wearables, smart contracts, bots, system integration has become very vital on different technology platforms. McCamish is engaging with clients to expedite and enrich their product capabilities by supporting them with their policy administration system. In the new polyglot environment with different organizations, an API Gateway is the perfect solution to publish, manage, and monitor APIs from McCamish for its clients.
Request for services
Find out more about how we can help your organization navigate its next. Let us know your areas of interest so that we can serve you better
