Intel and Amazon made an interesting announcement today, the Intel® Expressway API manager is now available on the AWS Marketplace.  For many enterprises that are using AWS this makes adding API Management to projects quite easy.  The obvious application is in enterprise mobilization, as discussed last year in this weblog article on mobilization, where using APIs solves a range of security and management issues in exposing enterprise applications and data to devices outside the enterprise’s firewall.

A simple example is an enterprise wants to stop employees using Dropbox, so offers its own sharing service.  This can be secured through the API Manager, see diagram below, and using the secure broker capability within Expressway it can be integrate with the company’s existing identity management infrastructure in its legacy data center; hybrid cloud deployments just became much easier.  This means the tablet and smartphone clients can use OAuth or even dedicated API keys to ensure the enterprise service or data being accessed is from a specific employee on a specific device.

The service costs $3.78 per hour flat (regardless of whether the EC2 instance is a standard XL or a High I/O 4XL) with an anticipated capacity of up to 10k requests per second you have a full API Management layer running in the cloud.  While working on BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and cloud infrastructure projects on AWS, API management can be added and configured quickly.  Even for Telcos this can be a quick and easy way to experiment with a number of enterprise API scenarios.  This announcement also highlights why Layer 7 and Mashery were smart to exit into larger companies with broader offers as the core API Management infrastructure is becoming much easier to consume.  To find out more, Amazon and Intel will be running a webinar about Intel® Expressway API manager on AWS, and there’s Intel’s EC2 Security page.

Example Architecture of how Intel Expressway is implemented on AWS