Product Overview of API7 Cloud
API7 Cloud is a comprehensive API management platform designed to simplify the deployment, monitoring, and visualization of APIs in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. Here’s a detailed look at what the product does and its key features.
Core Functionality
API7 Cloud is built on top of Apache APISIX, a highly performant and flexible API gateway. The platform focuses on managing the control plane of the API gateway, freeing users from the complexities of daily operations and ensuring that API management is centralized and efficient. This approach allows users to configure services, routes, and monitor the running status of their gateway instances without worrying about the underlying control plane.
Key Features
Multi-Cloud Support
API7 Cloud supports deployment in any cloud environment or on-premises, eliminating the risk of vendor lock-in. This flexibility ensures that customer services can be deployed wherever needed, maintaining compatibility with Apache APISIX and allowing seamless migration from open-source to cloud environments.
Traffic Management
The platform offers sophisticated traffic management features, including dynamic load balancing, circuit breakers, rate limiting, and throttling. These capabilities help in managing API traffic spikes, ensuring high availability, and maintaining service stability.
Security and Protection
API7 Cloud provides robust security features such as mutual TLS (mTLS) for encrypted communications, identity authentication, IP blacklists/whitelists, OAuth, and JSON Web Token (JWT) authentication. These measures ensure comprehensive security protection and compliance with regulations like GDPR.
Observability and Analytics
The platform includes built-in observability features that visualize key metrics such as API latency, QPS (queries per second), HTTP status code distribution, and request success rates. This allows users to identify potential issues in the system promptly and make data-driven decisions.
API Lifecycle Management
API7 Cloud supports full-lifecycle API management, including API design, testing, deployment, and monitoring. It helps in creating APIs by importing OpenAPI documents, managing canary releases, blue-green deployments, and other advanced deployment strategies.
Developer Portal and API Consumption
The platform provides a developer portal that offers API and app performance analytics, self-service capabilities, and consumer management. This facilitates better engagement with developers and streamlined API consumption.
Extensibility and Customization
API7 Cloud supports a wide range of protocols (TCP/UDP, Dubbo, MQTT, gRPC, SOAP, WebSocket) and includes a flexible plugin mechanism. This allows for customizations to cater to specific business requirements and supports serverless execution through user-defined functions.
High Performance
The platform is known for its high performance, with Apache APISIX capable of handling up to 23,000 QPS with an average delay of only 0.6 milliseconds. This ensures that the API gateway can handle large volumes of traffic efficiently.
Pricing and Plans
API7 Cloud offers various pricing plans, including a free plan with limited features, a standard plan at $250 per user per month, and an enterprise custom plan tailored to specific business needs. There is no free trial available, but the plans are designed to meet the diverse requirements of different organizations.
In summary, API7 Cloud is a powerful API management solution that leverages the strengths of Apache APISIX to provide a centralized, efficient, and secure way to manage APIs across multiple cloud environments. Its comprehensive features and high performance make it an ideal choice for enterprises looking to optimize their API management processes.