Software AG extends webMethods API Management Platform for APAC

Software AG has launched a new product for Asia Pacific (APAC) organisations named webMethods AppMesh, a configurable control plane that extends the company's webMethods API Management Platform.

The new offering adds application context and aims to aid businesses in gaining greater agility, management and governance of microservices.

It is designed to increase visibility into the running of an application, providing insight into who is using it and what they are doing.

This helps to centralise app governance and make it easier to provision and scale across an architecture.

The webMethods AppMesh is able to be plugged into any service mesh to give application awareness, which aids businesses in better management of API-led integrations.

Organisations can use the tool to apply business rules to drive application-specific behaviour, create application-level governance and security policies, add new services and capabilities, and perform context-aware application routing and orchestration.

This can be done without changing existing microservices or the underlying code, the company states.

Key features of the offering include Custom Access Protection to protect microservices and reduce risk of exposure with advanced user identification and security policies.

Sophisticated Policy-Based Control enables organisations to gain visibility into what their users are doing, and to control how their app is responding.

Traffic Monitoring and Control helps to manage the load on provider services. This includes applying limits to service invocations during a specific time interval for identified clients, and logging all traffic requests and responses for analysis.

Plug-in to the Service Mesh means the solutions is pre-integrated with industry-standard service meshes. As such, it is non-intrusive and has no effect on service mesh behaviour.

Dashboard for Service Visibility enables businesses to trace the path a transaction takes through the service mesh and understand how their app is being used with the AppMesh dashboard. This can be filtered to include only the services in the application.

The ability to Add and Remove Services from the webMethods AppMesh means businesses can bring new capabilities online with no downtime.

Finally the ability to automatically expose API interface means an API signature is available for every service in the mesh, enabling reuse across the service landscape.

In addition, these APIs can now be managed and governed with an end-to-end API lifecycle management platform, Software AG states.

Software AG VP solution architecture Jigar Bhansali says, "Across Asia Pacific, enterprises are increasingly betting on microservices-based architectures as agility, scalability and speed take centre stage.

"Given operational challenges brought about by the complexity of distributed services, Software AG's webMethods AppMesh helps organisations in the region overcome struggles, allowing enterprises to better create customised behaviour for end users and enhance their application without affecting users.

Software AG Chief product officer Dr Stefan Sigg says, "As businesses scale, their IT landscape and ecosystems become a lot more complex.

"While the service mesh was created to address network-level concerns such as service discovery, connectivity and security, it lacks application and business context.

"webMethods AppMesh adds the missing piece to make solutions understandable and usable to application owners and API providers. In turn, organisations are able to create new applications more quickly and decrease the time it takes to get these to market.