IBM API Connect Pros and Cons

The most valuable feature is the security we get from this solution. I know of a bank that uses it to ensure that everything is secure. The second feature I like is the retail environment, where we actually want to be able to provide as many suppliers and consumers with APIs as possible. If you are well-trained in the writing of RESTful API's, you can actually publish an API in a matter of minutes, test it, and publish it.

Our version supports containerized integration. I can write APIs, which can be moved into a testing environment without needing a forklift. It can check if APIs are compliant before moving them into production.

Security is well organized and managed within the solution.

The developer portal has been the most useful feature.

It is quite stable. We've not had any problem. It has made for a good buy because we are finding that other companies that have similar set ups go down maybe once a month.

It is a complete all-in-one solution.

The centralized management: this provides a management module that can deploy and apply security policies to all APIs, including all the gateways that are deployed on-premises and on any cloud because the gateway component can run at a VMware or in a Kubernetes cluster.

It has all of the tools that are needed for the specific mission.

The solution is very scalable because it's on the cloud.

It allows enterprises to expose some of their tech to outside stakeholders.

The new version is very unstable.

There are issues with upgrading in the cloud version. The cloud version is extremely buggy. We prefer to use the on-premise version.

Different versions of the same thing can mean unnecessary duplication.

Like any typical IBM infrastructure setup, you need to learn to set it up yourself. It's not one of those simple zip files or an archive unzip and you're up and running in some few minutes. Knowledge to set it up is key.

I would like to see support for non-Java based services. We struggle a bit to be able to deploy and connect our .NET services because of things like data types. We had to map a couple of things. For one solution provider, we had to move them to .NET Core before we could use it properly. I would like to see more agnostic tool service platforms rather than moving it more towards Java or open source.

It needs to be less taxing on compute resources.

It is expensive within this class of products.

The integration of an API gateway that implements the sidecar pattern, which can be deployed in cloud applications, and expose the microservices directly in each pod, this can be more decentralized components.

The automation and the simplicity could be improved.

In the next version, I don't know if they've already been included it or not, but the designer and all the tools should be on the cloud. I don't want any external installation or local installation.

I would like to see automation of the installation. If there could be a single-click function where you could automate everything, that would be helpful.