Growing the API Ecosystem - APITools for App Consumers

Yesterday was a big day for us because we announced APItools – our new service for API Consumers (Developers and Ops teams that use APIs day in day out). While we’re hard at work on our main API Management products at 3scale (see here), APItools has been bubbling away for a while and we’re happy to be able to get it into the hands of more people – there was great coverage in various places [Forbes, Kin Lane - API Evangelist, APIScene, Hacker News].

APItools provides a proxy layer that enables tracking, control and analysis of traffic going to and from the APIs used by your Apps. The system means you can transform inbound and outbound calls to an API without having to rewrite your app and it is designed to help both at development time and during operations. Yesterday’s announcement was a beta of the cloud version, but we plan to offer on premise in the future also. The services are free but there may be paid add-ons later.

Request beta invite!

So a legitimate question might be – why would a company like 3scale which provides services to API Providers launch something like APItools? Is it a change in business direction or product?

The answer is simple: we’re more committed than ever to providing great API Provider solutions – and there is a new launch coming on that front too, however as APIs become more ubiquitous, the challenge of using them effectively rises. As a company we see our mission as enabling as many people as possible to easily open APIs and to consume them.

Taking our experience from the provider side and making it available to API consumers we hope means we can make a big contribution to the way APIs are used and help make this process easier. In turn, things we learn from APItools should help us build smarter, better, more integrated API Management solutions.

We’re excited about the future of APIs and committed to providing the best solutions we can. Looking forward to exciting times going forward!