After completing this section, you should be able to create Backends and Products in the Admin Portal. Describe the process to promote APIs from Development to Production.

3scale API Management acts as a configurable proxy to your applications. It also provides functionality for various API management tasks, such as billing and usage monitoring. Backends and products are two of the main types of objects in 3scale API Management.

Conceptually, you can imagine requests traversing through the various parts of your configuration.

Figure 2.1: Conceptual request flow

In the preceding diagram, note that the underlying APIs are not publicly exposed.

A backend represents a deployed application by pointing to its root URL.

For example, a REST API is hosted at http://myapp.example.com and provides a /ping endpoint. The full path to the endpoint would be http://myapp.example.com/ping.

However, the URL of the 3scale backend would solely contain http://myapp.example.com. This allows the requester to reach multiple endpoints with a single backend for an application.

Backends are associated with one or more products. By associating a backend to a product, the product's users can access the underlying API.

Creating a Backend with the Admin Portal

Navigate to backend management with the top pane drop-down menu within the admin portal.

Figure 2.2: 3scale top pane navigation

From here, you can create new backends and manage existing ones.

To create a new backend, click Create Backend, fill out the form, and submit it.

Products, previously called services, represent a collection of 3scale objects that pertain to a specific client or group of users.

Products contain the following 3scale configuration objects:

Note that backends do not belong to a product. This is because the same backend can be associated with several different products. Different products do not need separate backends for the same underlying API.

[user@host ~]$ 3scale service create \ 
3scale-tenant \ 
library-product

Managing a Product with the Admin Portal

Navigate to product management with the top pane drop-down menu within the admin portal.

From here, you can create new products and manage existing ones.

After selecting a product to work within, the left-hand pane is used to navigate between the management pages for components within that product.

Figure 2.3: Product left pane navigation.

For example, in the previous screenshot, the library-product is selected. Click Applications → Application Plans to manage application plans within that product.

To use a backend within a product, you must first associate the two. Within the product section in the admin portal, navigate to Integration → Backends.

This page shows the list of backends currently accessible by the product, their URLs, and the product path to access them. To add an existing backend to the product, click Add Backend, select the backend, and provide a path. This path is a suffix that maps to the backend.

Note that backend paths must be unique within a product, as they are what the router uses to direct requests to the correct backend.

Within the product section in the admin portal, navigate to Integration → Configuration. This page shows the status of your staging and production environments.

Changes you make to a product are not live until you promote the configuration. If you have any changes not yet in the staging environment then the Configuration item shows a warning icon.

Figure 2.4: A warning icon shows that there are changes to be promoted.

The two environments are staging and production. Each environment can have separate configurations, but changes must go to the staging environment first.

To promote configuration changes to the staging environment, click Promote v. X to Staging APIcast, where X is an auto-incrementing version number.

After promoting changes to staging, you can then promote them to production by clicking Promote v. X to Production APIcast.