Red Hat and the API economy

These are exciting times for enterprise software developers! Never before have there been so many platform tools and technologies to choose from, yet never before has it been possible to get started so quickly with such sophisticated software. Open source and the cloud have expanded production, accelerated delivery, and simplified adoption of the stuff of the future.

In a world where the once-simple notion of an “application” has been blown apart into overlapping agglomerations of disparately-grained modules ranging from full apps to SOA services to microservices, there is a key element of stability to make it all work: the API. As a sort of contract with the rest of the world, the API specifies what you can request of a service and what you’ll get back. The underlying implementation of an API can change, and its capacity can change, but as long as nothing is removed from the API itself, other applications and services can depend on it.

APIs are the backbone--or arguably the entire skeleton--of enterprise software. Managing APIs, i.e., the development, deployment, access control, monitoring, scaling, and lifecycling of APIs, is of fundamental concern in the modern IT shop. Neglect APIs and you may have a brittle, scale-limited horizon of functionality at best, with a security nightmare or other huge risks at worst. Manage APIs well, and you can have a platform for digital transformation.

Given the fundamental importance of API management, I am ecstatic to share the news today that Red Hat is acquiring 3scale, with whom we’ve had a very successful collaboration for more than a year. The 3scale technology complements the Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio, adding a robust and comprehensive set of API management capabilities to the existing rich integration features offered in today’s Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), JBoss Fuse, JBoss A-MQ and the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform. Our customers have increased their priority on API management features for their integration projects, and we are excited to now be able to bring the 3scale offering to the table alongside our tried-and-true JBoss offerings.

3scale is today offered in an as-a-Service model and joins Red Hat OpenShift Online and Red Hat Mobile Application Platform in that format. We plan to quickly create an on-prem version and open source the code in the Red Hat way.

We believe this is great news for our customers and prospects. We look forward to working with you on your digital transformation projects and helping you compete and win in the API Economy!