Let’s spend a bit of time learning more about one of the newer ways you can run apiman: as a set of microservices.
Running apiman in this way has several advantages, including (but not limited to):
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Fast startup time
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Fully decoupled
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Easily debuggable from an IDE
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Quick to test different configurations
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Independently scale (esp. via fabric8/openshift/kubernetes)
On the other hand, breaking everything apart has some disadvantages as well. Some of these include:
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Need to fire up multiple, separate Java processes
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No authentication integration with Keycloak out of the box
What are they?
What do we mean by "apiman microservices"? Well, by default if you download apiman from the project site, you’ll get everything delivered to you in one convenient package. This package extracts into an existing WildFly installation, and thus everything runs as a web application within the application server. This is very convenient to evaluate the software, but it’s not ideal for development or for dockerizing.
In addition to our support for WildFly and EAP, we also now support simply running the various components of apiman as standalone Java applications. You can find the specific source modules that provide this functionality here:
These two modules provide Java classes which use an embedded version of Jetty to start up the API Manager and API Gateway as simple standalone Java processes. Each microservice includes a Starter class with a Java main method. Both microservices are designed to be easily extensible/customizable to fit whatever purpose or configuration is desired.
How do I use them?
As I mentioned, the microservices are intended to be extended and customized. So you could create a new maven project and add the specific apiman microservice module as a dependency and then….
OK I probably lost you already. It’s actually not very hard, so here’s a whole GitHub repository full of examples:
Each of the modules in there is a very simple pre-baked and configured microservice based on what apiman provides. So for example, if you want to run an Elasticsearch version of the API Gateway along with a Postgres version of the API Manager, you could follow these two sets of directions:
If you run both of these at the same time, you will end up with two entirely separate Java processes running embedded Jetty and listening on different ports.
What about the API Manager UI?
There are two ways you can access the API Manager User Interface. The first is that it’s built into the API Manager microservice! Once you have the Manager microservice running, you should be able to go here:
Using gulp (development only)
If you’re looking to use the microservices to make it easier to do development work on apiman, then you might find yourself needing to modify the User Interface. You can do this by running "gulp" in the UI module of the apiman source tree:
$ cd ~/git/apiman/manager/ui/hawtio/
ewittman@falcon ~/git/apiman/apiman/manager/ui/hawtio
$ gulp
[14:56:29] Using gulpfile ~/git/apiman/apiman/manager/ui/hawtio/gulpfile.js
[14:56:29] Starting 'default'...
[14:56:29] Starting 'build'...
[14:56:29] Starting 'browserify'...
[14:56:29] Starting 'css'...
[14:56:29] Starting 'fonts'...
[14:56:29] Starting 'images'...
[14:56:29] Finished 'build' after 58 ms
[14:56:29] Starting 'watch'...
[14:56:29] Finished 'watch' after 10 ms
[14:56:29] Starting 'connect'...
[14:56:29] Finished 'connect' after 49 ms
[14:56:29] Finished 'default' after 126 ms
[14:56:29] Server started http://localhost:2772
[14:56:30] Finished 'css' after 589 ms
[14:56:37] Finished 'images' after 7.49 s
[14:56:41] Finished 'fonts' after 12 s
[14:56:41] Finished 'browserify' after 12 s
[14:56:41] Starting 'path-adjust'...
[14:56:41] Finished 'path-adjust' after 38 ms
[14:56:41] Starting 'clean-defs'...
[14:56:41] Finished 'clean-defs' after 7.87 ms
[14:56:41] Starting 'tsc'...
[14:56:45] Finished 'tsc' after 4.19 s
[14:56:45] Starting 'template'...
[14:56:45] Finished 'template' after 132 ms
[14:56:45] Starting 'concat'...
[14:56:45] Finished 'concat' after 72 ms
[14:56:45] Starting 'clean'...
[14:56:45] Finished 'clean' after 8.82 msOnce you have the API Manager microservice and gulp running, you should be able to access the UI by going here:
Warning: Authentication
At the moment, the biggest problem with the microservices is the issue of user authentication. Currently, only very simple BASIC authentication is supported.
It’s always tricky talking about authentication with apiman - but in this context I’m referring to authenticating into the apiman UI and REST services. All the authentication related Policies will work.
The microservices allow you to specify your own users.list file, which should include the static set of users you wish to allow access. In the future, we will be improving the microservices to support other authentication mechanisms. Note that you can do this yourself by overriding this:
Good luck and come find us on the mailing list or IRC if you have any trouble!
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