Advertising with WSO2 API Manager by Publishing to External API Store

 In WSO2 API Manager 1.5.0, we don't have the support of API sharing across tenants because with the current design, there is not way to replicate API metadata that should be written to the databases and registries along with the API configurations. Therefore, there is no straightforward approach to replicate a set of tenant APIs from one tenant to others.

 

But we have the Advertising feature, where we have the capability of displaying APIs published by tenant 1, in tenant 2's API store. However, tenant 2's users will not be able to subscribe to the APIs published by tenant 1.

To do this, you need to uncomment the <ExternalAPIStores> element in $APIM_HOME/repository/conf/api-manager.xml. Tenant's external API stores can be configured as follows by giving the tenant domain, tenant admin's user name and password
     <ExternalAPIStore id="Store1" type="wso2">
            <DisplayName>Store1</DisplayName>
            <Endpoint>http://localhost:9763/store?tenant=abc.com</Endpoint>
            <Username>abc@abc.com</Username>
            <Password>abc123</Password>
        </ExternalAPIStore>

Imagine you logged into the API Publisher as the tenant xyz.com. Then in the UI, there will be a tab available saying "External API Store". There, you will be able to see all the External tenant details you have configured earlier via the api-manager.xml. Now tenant xyz.com can publish its API, so that tenant abc.com too can see it.
Now if you login to tenant abc.com's API store, you will see the API advertised or published by tenant xyz.com. (But still tenant abc.com will not be able to subscribe to it using abc.com's credentials. )

Await for the next WSO2 API Manager release, which will allow you to subscribe to the Advertised API regardless of the tenant. 

Experience What is New in Mulit Tenanted WSO2 App Factory

App Factory is a multi-tenanted Enterprise platform that enables multiple project teams to collaboratively create, run and manage enterprise applications.

This is a one stop shop, which helps you to manage your agile application development, testing and releasing process by providing all the necessary tools and options. This includes
 - Continous Build system (Jenkins build farm)
 - Source control system (Git repo)
 - User management system (LDAP)
 - Issue tracking system (WSO2 Issue Tracker)
 - Application hosting environment (WSO2 AS)
 - API management environment (WSO2 API Manager)
 - Databases and datasource management environment (MySQL)

The inceptional design of AF (App Factory) was such that, an application was considered as a tenant. There was no organization concept attached in the old AF story.

But now the story has been matched with the real organizational behavior in an industry. In the current implementation, we have considered this organizational concept into picture. Now, an ORGANIZATION IS A TENANT.

You can register an Organization in App Factory and you will be getting a tenant space for your organization. In their you can have multiple applications belonging to your organization. (Earlier you are getting a tenant space each time you create an application. Now tenant space is given at the creation of organization)

Few architectural changes in essence

	New Architecture	Old Architecture
Cartridge subscription happens at	Tenant creation	Application creation
Jenkins allocation	For each tenant, jenkins_home and maven_home is set. Jenkins.war is copied to all tenants Jenkins.war has a context.xml that contains tenant specific domain info	Jenkins_home and maven_home is shared among applications Single Jenkins.war for all the apps
Git repo creation	No space is created at tenant creation. At application creation, a repo is created with the tenant name appended to the repo url as $git_basedir/abc.com/app1.git	At application creation. Created repo is $git_basedir/app1.git
Issue tracker	Any user in an organization can see all the issues of all apps in that organization.	App level isolation on the issues.
User Management	Roles (Dev, QA, DevOps, AppOwner) are for the organization level. Not for the application level Multiple app owners per app Developers can’t create apps	Roles for the users are in application level Single app owner per app Developers can create apps

We have put up all these latest changes into a preview hosting, so you can get a glimpse of it.
To experience all these latest changes visit
https://cloudpreview.wso2.com/ and register your tenant now and start playing around with it.

Hope you will enjoy your new AF experience.