Red Hat launches 3scale APIcast - faster, flexible, open source API gateway

Dockerized version of APIcast 2.0 deploys on OpenShift for easier installation and operation in microservice environments

Today we’re happy to announce the general availability of Red Hat 3scale APIcast gateway 2.0. The APIcast gateway (NGINX-based) is open source and has served hundreds of happy customers over the last four years. Now we’ve taken it to the next level, supporting both a cloud gateway or hybrid model with an on-prem gateway. In fact, the new on-premise version introduces significant upgrades in terms of performance and flexibility. 3scale was the first in market with on-prem and now we are pleased to offer the second generation.

The API gateway, which is configured within 3scale’s Admin Portal, is part of the 3scale API Management SaaS offering. The Admin Portal allows customers to define desired authentication methods, set rate limits, get analytics on the usage of their APIs, and create a developer portal for their API consumers. APIcast 2.0  is the first of two on-prem releases. With the upcoming 3scale on-premise release, customers will be able to deploy the entire 3scale API Management Platform on-premises. Stay tuned!

Companies are increasingly migrating to microservices architecture, so the average number of API services managed with 3scale have significantly increased, and continue to do so. To accommodate to these requirements, APIcast changes the way it pulls the configuration from the Admin Portal. For starters, now it’s now possible to pull the configuration for just a subset of services. In addition, it makes it easier to automate the deployment of multiple gateways by providing the gateway configuration via a JSON file which can be fetched by an API. It also supports two environments out-of-the-box (staging and production) with options to enable always-up-to-date configs in staging, and control of updates in production. For example, you can set the reload config variable to true so it reloads the API gateway configuration with each request, which comes in handy during development phases.

Another big change introduced with APIcast 2.0 is the enhanced integration with Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, which leverages Docker and Kubernetes for an easier deployment and DevOps experience. The new OpenShift template pulls the dockerized image of APIcast from the Red Hat container registry and lets you enable/disable key features of the API gateway by just changing the value of the corresponding template parameter.

Get started with APIcast 2.0:

• APIcast overview
• Deploying APIcast
• Deploying APIcast on OpenShift