Layer7 API Management Review

I have used this tool for my customers, as I am a service provider, not an end user. I have dealt with implementations and configurations for CA API Management.

We implemented the API versioning for software services and REST services.

Mostly, it can identify client IT and user accounts to give them a lot of business logic. It can also provide API versioning. It can provide different versions to different customers, but the original API are the same.

Controlling microservices for my customers.

It provides a good user interface and is easy to use.

It is not user-friendly because you have to know so many programming languages.

It is a stable product. I have had no issue with it.

The scalability is good.

When it comes to supporting a large number of APIs or transactions, the performance is not bad, because it is in staging. We have not moved it to production.

Our client's environment has four CA API Gateways.

The technical support responds very quickly by email. The last time that I communicated with the technical support, I asked them, "If MariaDB, instead of SQL, is compatible with CA API Gateway?"

However, now CA's entire product service is poor in Taiwan, as there is no local support.

The implementation of CA API Management was complex. It took us (my colleague and me) six months to implement with two people. My colleague was responsible for implementing the API Gateway. 

My colleague is a system engineer. Because I am a programmer, I am in charge of the design and customizability. It is a complicated solution. You have to know so much IT knowledge to do the implementation.

The solution helped us to quickly publish and monetize APIs. I have used versioning responses to publish or send APIs to different customers with different versions.

It has a reasonable pricing model by instance.

I would not recommend the product based on how it has performed to implement it. I did not like working with the product.

We have not used it to modernize legacy systems via microservices, APIs, or developing a new platform for mobile. We also did not use it for connecting data to apps via APIs.

I am not familiar with the security aspects of the solution.

We stopped offering the product as a service a month ago since the product no longer belongs to CA. In Taiwan, I believe no one will buy CA products anymore because it is no longer trustworthy as a company, since the products are no longer supported.