WSO2 API management

What do you like best?

The fact that WSO2 API Manager is a very complete product for free is a hard to beat argument. The separation between "subscriber" and "Store", which are both very clean UI interfaced applications, is also a strong argument. After everything is setup correctly, it's a very easy to use product.

What do you dislike?

What I strongly dislike is the fact that in order to get this to work, especially in combination with analytics, you need highly in-depth knowledge of how WSO2 API Manager works. It's a java based application, that is dependent on so many config files, that I don't even want to search right now, in order to count them. I'm afraid it would overload the cpu of the server.... You want to change the DNS name of WSO2 API Manager? Try to find the right config file. Then try to find the right entries where instead of an ip you want the DNS. WSO2 works internally with a kind of API based system I guess, meaning that every thing communicates by ip with at least 5 different protocols (http, udp, whatnot...). Ports? Extra products like analytics have some configuration with "port + 1", but not everywhere, and not always. As a matter of fact, why is Analytics a separate product anyway? I actually hired an WSO2 expert to solve some issues we had, but he couldn't remember which config file had to change where... only to have our "admin" password changed, without the whole system collapsing.

A good API manager (or any software product for that matter) may have the requirement of needing expert knowledge on how to use it. Not on how to maintain it, update it, install it. That should not be your core job. It's a dragon, and not a single developer or infrastructure engineer wants to use it in our company, out of fear of collapsing the thing. No wonder if everybody wants to move to cloud based solutions...

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Hire an expert, focus on getting everything under control right from the start (DNS, https, firewall security, extra products like analytics, log files can grow beyond your server capacities, etc).

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We implement a micro-service architecture, based on a strict domain-driven architecture. From this perspective WSO2 performs really well. Categorizing API's into groups for instance is a very nice feature. Unfortunately, this is only possible in the store.

Usage is very easy. It takes no less than 1 minute to expose an API. The "subscribe" mechanism is very intuitive. Everything is very intuitive!

Except the software itself.... What is it with java developers and config files???