You can categorize published REST APIs and operations into logical API groups to easily manage the APIs in your organization. To create an API group, you must be assigned the Deployer or Admin role.
Using API groups, you can package a set of related APIs and assets for easy discovery. You can customize the API package with different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and rate limit policies to meet diverse requirement scenarios. You can enhance API management by allowing the API group administrators to create, update, and manage API groups and their SLAs within an organization.
Managing APIs in a group helps avoid API duplication. If you can’t find existing APIs to reuse in part or as a whole, APIs are likely to be regularly duplicated, increasing the development time and costs.
With API groups, you can engage more roles in your API ecosystem and share your APIs with extended users to reap the benefits of an API-first approach. This approach enables product owners and business technologists to easily find, use, and work with your APIs.
API group examples
Some example scenarios of API groups include:
Employees APIs
If your application holds "Employees" records, then you can create one group named "Employee APIs". Include all required actions to get information, add, modify, and delete employee records. Similarly, you can create a "Salaries APIs" group to manage related salaries information.
Online food delivery APIs
An online food delivery service can have various APIs, such as,
- User API
- Restaurant location API
- Payments API
- Transaction API
- Rewards API
These APIs can be grouped into packages like user-centric group which can include User and Rewards API, and a Financial group which can include Payments and Transactions API.
Weather API
A weather company that forecasts atmospheric conditions can have different APIs, such as,
- Locations API
- Forecast API
- Current Conditions API
- Weather Alarms API
- Alerts API
- Imagery API
- Tropical API
Using API groups, the weather company can package different sets of APIs to target diverse consumer requirements with specific SLAs that meet those needs. API consumers can access related APIs to simplify asset discovery. Administrators can modify SLAs with ease, ensuring governance.