[MUSIC PLAYING]
JENNY BROWN: Hi, I'm Jenny.
And today I'd like to talk to you
about a question that comes up from enterprises quite a bit.
How do you choose when and where to use service management
and when and where to use API management?
While it may feel like there's overlap,
I'm here to highlight the differences that
make it easy to pick the right technology for your use cases.
First, we'll do a quick overview on service management and API
management.
And then we're going to jump into the modernization journey
as well as some use cases.
We'll summarize everything at the end.
But for now, let's dive right in.
First, let's cover the basics.
What are service management and API management?
Service management is usually done with a service mesh.
It manages the communications between services,
and it's focused on handling overall service to service
policies or telemetry.
API management is usually done with an API platform.
It's all about managing the life cycle of APIs
and is geared towards API publishing, consumption,
governance, and receiving analytics of usage of APIs
by consumers.
Those sound pretty different, so what's the confusion about?
Here's the thing.
Both service management and API management
are an essential part of an enterprise's modernization
journey.
So the real question is not which one to choose, rather,
when and where.
You might choose one over the other
depending on where you are in your modernization journey.
Or you might choose API management for one use case
and service management for a different part of your business
with a different use case.
If you're involved in a modernization journey,
then you most likely have one or both of the following goals--
to modernize applications with cloud-native technologies
to deliver software faster or transform businesses
by giving developers, partners, and customers unique ways
to interact with your products.
To accomplish both of these goals,
you'll need both the service management and API management.
Let's walk through six scenarios where
you can decide where and when to choose service management
and/or API management.
First up.
Imagine your organization is building an internal platform
with requirements around standardized security policies
and controls.
Here, a service management layer will give you
all the capabilities you need to secure and control the traffic
within that platform.
Next, your SRE team wants to monitor
the health and performance of the services
within that platform.
In this scenario, service management
can provide your team with the metrics, logs,
and tracing so they can set SLOs and get alerts.
And what about when a network operator on your team
needs to configure networking components so that services can
communicate across clusters in hybrid and/or multi cloud
situations?
Service management provides you a way
to standardize networking across those environments
and components.
And now imagine that this platform is owned by a business
unit within an enterprise.
They might want to set up a shared service model
where other business units can discover and reuse
some of those standardized services as APIs.
In this case, the goal is to provide easy visibility
for other teams, which are outside the domain of trust,
into what APIs are available and how to use them.
An API management platform is a great way
to govern this process.
It would provide the mechanism to expose these APIs
to other teams, provide access to these services,
and the tools to measure API usage through analytics.
Here, this organization is now at a point
where they want to bring third-party partners
and developers into the mix.
This could be to adhere to industry practices,
such as open banking, or to expand your business
model to new channels.
Similar to our last use case, an API management platform
will let you securely expose those services
outside of your organization and give you the tools
and provide easy onboarding and access.
Now that you've given all these stakeholders access
to those APIs, you want to see how they're being used
and potentially even explore some monetization
opportunities.
This is another scenario where an API management
platform is a great fit.
You can get visibility into API consumption and growth,
determine which APIs are valuable,
and put monetization models around APIs
that you want to charge third parties for.
As you can see, there are many distinct use cases
for service management and API management.
Depending on your needs, you may start with one or the other.
You may use them for different initiatives.
Or you may even use both service management and API management
together to perform different functions for a platform
that you're building.
To summarize, if you're primarily
looking for a technology for service-to-service
communication that maintains the quality of service
in a system composed of distributed services,
then service management is the best fit.
And if you're looking to drive consumption of those services
as APIs by different business units or partners
and build new business channels, then API management
is the best fit.
In our experience, both service management and API management
are crucial in any organization's application
modernization journey.
Here at Google, we provide service management capabilities
through Anthos Service Mesh, which is a part of Anthos,
and API management capabilities through Apigee.
Check out these links below for more information,
and let us know what else you'd like
to learn about Google Cloud.