Layer7 API Management Reviews

One valuable feature is the ease of development of the policies for the product. It's very easy to have a brand new developer come in and develop a policy to expose our APIs.

It's benefited us greatly in allowing us to expose our APIs to external third-party vendors in a secure fashion.

I would like to see the GMU, the automated deployment framework, available in some sort of graphical interface. This would allow options, outside of automation, so you could see things graphically.

The product is becoming more stable as the product has become more mature. At this point, it's a pretty stable product.

On the scalability perspective, the product has no issues. It's able to scale out horizontally and vertically and has posed no problem for us. We have a pretty large implementation.

I have absolutely used technical support. They have been pretty good, especially when more complex issues are escalated. They've got some resources that do a wonderful job in helping us come to a resolution.

We didn't have a previous solution specific to this. We had some other products where there was some overlap with this product, but none of the products accomplished what this did. We had a specific need.

There were multiple products that were specialized in different things, but they could do some of the stuff that this product could do. This solution is very narrowly focused on API management.

I was involved in the installation and implementation. I think it was lacking some documentation around performance tuning and getting the product operationalized so that it could maintain itself. The documentation is still a little bit lacking in those areas. The documentation is available on demand, or on informal places like community chat groups where you can get information, but as far as in the product documentation itself, it's lacking in those areas.

When selecting a vendor, look at the partnership with the company. See if they're able to listen to you about your needs. See if they are able to respond quickly. See that the product provides good value. Work closely with the vendor to make sure you get things set up correctly. If you don't, you'll be very disappointed.

We use the API Management tool mostly for the portal application and managing the APIs.

CA has a portal where we can expose the public and private APIs across the globe. We use it as a gateway for security and exposing the internal applications through that layer.

For us, it acts like a proxy as it passes through the API layer. We use it to transmit data from one format to another format, especially to route the data based on the content. This is a seamless process. There are little challenges in regards to the AWS integration but we were able to get through that and CA helped us move towards AWS.

The problem was that it was slow. This product was initially built as an in-house product, but later on they converted it to a pilot product. It was not ready at that time but now it is. We are fine-tuning it to make it available on AWS; so, it's good.

We're moving towards microservices. We do have around 358 to 400 APIs, i.e., monolithic APIs, and we want to convert them into lightweight microservices. We want to deploy them in a container, use the gateway and then expose those microservices to the external world. That’s our main goal and we are using CA API Gateway for this purpose.

I want a more loosely coupled migration utility.

Now they provide a DMU for migration of the code or APIs for continuous delivery. But it's not robust, so I want to see what CA is going to come up with regards to that.

In terms of using the tool itself, it is not user-friendly. You can use the product with ease, but once it starts developing the code, there are a lot of APIs and functions that are not readily available for you. You need to refer to a document to learn about that. They should provide some APIs which will drop down the list of all the functions and that are available and ready to use. The world is changing now; we don't want to be stuck in the 80s or 70s, where we need to search for everything and then try to write a code for it one-by-one. It needs be a good tool; easy for the customers to use it.

The main missing aspect from this tool is that although continuous delivery is available, it is not that straightforward and we have to work on that.

The stability is good except when we went live with AWS; that's when we had initial hiccups but slowly it improved. We are good at this point.

The good thing about McCloud being on AWS is scalability which you get by default. Hence, you don't have to worry about how you want to manage your infrastructure. By default, it will look at your load and there are some alarms set on that and then it will act. When you see the peak, it automatically scales to a new instance and when the load is too low, it will kill that new instance that it has created. AWS will help us with that.

We have used technical support. We had a few bugs in the code, i.e., bugs in the product code for which we had to talk to CA central customer service; they were good and responsive.

Previously, we were using OAG - Oracle Application Gateway. The CDCI was not that good with that. The continuous delivery and continuous integration are not readily available and there are a lot of bugs in the code, in the product. In comparison to that, the CA tool is less buggy.

There were a few reasons for choosing this vendor. The first being the continuous delivery and continuous integration, which was one of the major things we were looking for. Next, we wanted to look at the portal and the API itself; how do you manage the APIs, giving access, access control and all those aspects. The third thing we were looking at was security. So, these are 3 different things that we were considering whilst selecting a vendor.

I was part of the initial setup but CA was there with us to help through the implementation process. It's not complex.

We did do some research and tried to explore some of the API products available in the market. We did speak to all the different product owners, assessed it and then finally we came up with this solution.

Some of the vendors we looked at were Apigee and Amazon API Gateway.

Overall, this is a good product. Those who are interested in a similar product should try to do a PoC first and then see what you want from it.

We primarily use Layer7 API Management to monitor stuff. I'm the one who installs it. They sent me a TAR file, I unloaded it to TAR, brought it up, and made everything work. I gave it the three different network configurations to talk to the three different domains, and then I turn it over to the guys, and they do what they got to do with it.

The best part about it is that it doesn't stop if something is missing during the installation. It looks for it on its own. I don't have to be there to do it physically.

I've been using Layer7 API Management for about three months.

Layer7 API Management appears to be stable. No one has called me to say that it's not working.

Layer7 API Management is a scalable solution.

The initial setup wasn't that hard. You got all the Postgres and all those other little add-ons. It makes sure you've got this installed and that installed. There are prerequisites for what it needs before it gets up and running, but that's a piece of cake.

It all depends on how good your developers are. I know Nutanix and VMware. If you want to do a quick setup with VMware, they have everything preloaded, everything comes in one package, and everything needed for your application to work is already loaded into the bundle.

With SolarWinds, everything is configured for their SolarWinds app, and it's like having a Windows disc with the little features you can add. It's like, if you install the software for Windows or some of these other applications, you can break it down to where you can add in features as needed.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10, no solution is perfect.

I have used this tool for my customers, as I am a service provider, not an end user. I have dealt with implementations and configurations for CA API Management.

We implemented the API versioning for software services and REST services.

Mostly, it can identify client IT and user accounts to give them a lot of business logic. It can also provide API versioning. It can provide different versions to different customers, but the original API are the same.

Controlling microservices for my customers.

It provides a good user interface and is easy to use.

It is not user-friendly because you have to know so many programming languages.

It is a stable product. I have had no issue with it.

The scalability is good.

When it comes to supporting a large number of APIs or transactions, the performance is not bad, because it is in staging. We have not moved it to production.

Our client's environment has four CA API Gateways.

The technical support responds very quickly by email. The last time that I communicated with the technical support, I asked them, "If MariaDB, instead of SQL, is compatible with CA API Gateway?"

However, now CA's entire product service is poor in Taiwan, as there is no local support.

The implementation of CA API Management was complex. It took us (my colleague and me) six months to implement with two people. My colleague was responsible for implementing the API Gateway. 

My colleague is a system engineer. Because I am a programmer, I am in charge of the design and customizability. It is a complicated solution. You have to know so much IT knowledge to do the implementation.

The solution helped us to quickly publish and monetize APIs. I have used versioning responses to publish or send APIs to different customers with different versions.

It has a reasonable pricing model by instance.

I would not recommend the product based on how it has performed to implement it. I did not like working with the product.

We have not used it to modernize legacy systems via microservices, APIs, or developing a new platform for mobile. We also did not use it for connecting data to apps via APIs.

I am not familiar with the security aspects of the solution.

We stopped offering the product as a service a month ago since the product no longer belongs to CA. In Taiwan, I believe no one will buy CA products anymore because it is no longer trustworthy as a company, since the products are no longer supported.

We use the API Gateway as a front door to access our APIs that we host internally, to enable us to get involved in the digitalization.

It has performed very well, actually. It's given us new capabilities that we never had before and gives us more confidence in increasing the number of APIs that we actually have.

I think the flexibility. It's very configurable. Each policy is very customizable, where we can accommodate different capabilities that our trading partners actually have. Even though from a textbook standpoint, there's always a certain ideal pattern that you want to apply, that's rarely the case with our trading partners. That flexibility is very important.

And the main point of the Gateway is the security aspect of it. It's very good from that standpoint. It has met all of our expectations. We're very happy with that.

It gave us new capabilities that we really didn't have before. We didn't have a good way of exposing APIs to the internet in a reliable, secure way. It gave us that ability. 

It also gives us a focal point where it's allowing us to consolidate our portfolio. Where before - Cargill is a very large company - from one business unit to the next, they didn't necessarily know what we actually have. This product enables us to consolidate that, so there's one place to look.

The tool itself, I think, could be better. Along with the flexibility it does have, I wish it had a little more modern user interface. For troubleshooting, debugging, that kind of thing, it could definitely be better. I would like to see improvements in the user interface, for sure for Policy Manager. That's the developer's tool. 

Debugging seems a little bit archaic by modern standards. I would like to see that improved. 

I would like to see better documentation for the development language itself. I think they took a step backwards, actually, when they published all their documentation online. Accessibility is better because it's on the web. But the content seems to me to have taken a step backwards. Not enough details, more difficult to find specifics. And you would almost think that would be the opposite, but the feedback I've gotten from our developers, and my own experience, is that it's not the case.

But in terms of the structure of how the language works, it's pretty good. It gives you a lot of flexibility and allows you to accomplish a lot quickly.

So, in general, improvements in the UI, usability. Like I said, it seems dated in terms of how it works, by modern standards. I think they could go a long way to refurbishing the whole UI.

It's been very good. 

We have had some issues. Technically it's like a database replication issue, where our operations people tell me that the audit logs have been quite large, and that has caused some replication issues between the two nodes in our cluster. 

But outside of that, it's been very good.

We're relatively new to this so I don't think we're taxing the capacity of our gateway at all. In the business that we're in, I don't think that we're going to get to huge volumes anyways. Our goal is to leverage it more. So far, that hasn't been an issue at all.

The biggest thing for us would be that currently it is deployed in one region. We're a global company, so that technically is a little bit of a constraint for us. We haven't been able to deploy more gateways in other regions mainly due to cost of licensing.

Overall it's been very good. 

There are two perspectives. We've used our technical sales contacts. They have been very responsive and very good. We're lucky that we have a couple of them local in our city. They've actually come on-premise to help us. That's been very helpful, very good. Professional services has been really good too. I've spent a lot of time with them. Again, their expertise has been very valuable. 

From a ticket support point of view, where we submit a ticket, I would say that's been a little bit less helpful, in terms of responsiveness, and conveying the actual issue to the person. Once you get them on the phone, and have a one on one working session - which they have been willing to do - that's been very good. But through the ticketing system and the support website, it could be better.

It was a gap in our company. We knew we had APIs that we wanted to leverage and work with our trading partners, for them to access it. But working with our security team, we knew that we didn't have a good way of exposing them securely. That was a roadblock for our business. We couldn't make them accessible because of polices. API Gateway filled that gap and enabled us to use best practices to expose our APIs.

I have been involved more from the development standpoint. We're set up in two groups, an operational side which sets up the infrastructure, does actual server software; I haven't been involved too much from that standpoint. It's more in the development side, to get initial templates together and patterns that we're going to apply. And just coming up with some standards for our developers to use.

I would say it's complex. But I think part of it is just the nature of what this stuff is, when you're dealing with security and the variety of approaches that there can be. That makes it complex. For us, it was relatively new, so there were a lot of challenges there to just learn all the different aspects of it. 

We did consider other vendors. I wasn't part of the original selection, but it came down to two different vendors, CA being one of them - at the time it was Layer 7. Then we did a proof of concept, so I was involved in that. 

In the end, it was really no contest. I tell our other people about this: That it was a week long proof of concept and the other vendor, it couldn't complete one use case. In one week, they had three people that they brought on-premise to work on our use cases for the proof of concept, and they couldn't complete any of them. Layer 7, they completed all of the use cases in one afternoon. It was pretty convincing.

What's important to us when selecting a vendor, besides the product, the vendor needs to be of significant size to be able to continue to evolve the product. It needs to be able to provide enterprise-level support. We're a large company, so we expect the vendor to provide that backing of their product and SLAs. When we choose a product we don't want it to be a product that comes and goes. We want there to be a clear vision of where it's going, that's important to us. CA was able to demonstrate that to us.

It's very good in terms of what we wanted out of the product, initially. But now that we've explored and had the product for a while, we expect more. I think it definitely has room for improvement. Some of those things we're seeing here today, or in this week, at the CA World conference, give me some hope that that improvement is going to happen.

I would advise taking a look at what's available. Clearly, we've had good success with CA API Gateway, but this is a very quickly evolving space. I would encourage them to look at what's out there, what's available. They should prioritize what's important to them, what they're looking for out of the product. Then do a proof of concept to make sure that they feel comfortable, that the product is what they need. Also work with the technical support staff, to make sure that they're comfortable working with them too.

We have many use cases. We are doing an enterprise install for all CA API management tool searches which are covered under the ELA, Enterprise License Agreement. We have close to a 100 plus use cases that we want to deploy, the next is over a six months to one year timeline.

There are many things, which are really good, like the Gateway. That's really great and pretty useful. The Mobile API Gateway is also great.

We have not tested it to the extent that we should. Maybe six months down the line we will have a better picture.

At a high level, I would say the portal is a pain. CA double up portal is a pain. It is something that we are struggling with right now. That is just one of the products which is probably not sufficiently satisfactory. We are struggling to get it installed to be used now.

It is not a fully-baked product as a whole. So, individual solutions may be good, but they are evolving in their silos. There needs to be wholistic thinking about how each one of these products functions. Each one of these CA products under API management needs to work in synergy, and evolve in a more cohesive, coherent way so we as enterprise we can take it seamlessly without much pain. 

We have not used technical support yet.

We have ELA with other product vendors, like IBM and Oracle. However, we thought CA might be a good option based on their support within the account. The CA folks who are working, partnering with us within the account and our organization, they have been very reachable and very cooperative.

So even though we have licenses with IBM and Oracle for the same kind of products, API management, we are going ahead with CA just because of the trust that they were able to build. 

It was probably not that straightforward, because the vendor team (CA Services) struggled a bit. 

We implemented using CA Services to come and install the software.

I felt there was a lack of expertise on CA's part, because there are many things within the API management. Maybe the consultant from CA services who came to our organization did not have the experience on all the tools that CA was releasing, which was why the initial setup may not have been straightforward for him. He was good with Gateway, but with the other pieces, he was struggling a bit. It took sometime for him.

We already have ELA with multiple product vendors. It is a matter of using which one we want and moving forward. 

CA is worth trying. It is definitely a key contender in the API management space.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: size and brand value.

In terms of priority: the scalability, uptime and the way that it's versatile. You can load up multiple different kinds of services at the same time. We have multiple different services going live on a particular platform, concurrently. It happens a lot. It's important for a system to handle that. Then CA's API solution also works with multiple solutions which are provided by CA, like LISA tools and all that. Altogether, it's a very cohesive unit.

Some of the things that we see as room of improvement are how do you integrate with other systems out there. Integration with the existing systems and infrastructure, which is not necessarily related. How do you integrate those systems in? Examples could be: how does CA integrate with IBM or existing systems? Lot's of large organizations have existing systems they don't want to replace with other systems. How does CA's systems work with those systems concurrently? Those would be important considerations.

So far the stability has been really good, we haven't had any problem. I believe we have been using it for sometime. As per the industry standards, it's been quite stable. Personally, I have been involved for almost 2 years but I understand that our organization has been using it for quite some time. We are in a business which sees lots of volume, trillions of volumes of calls. The system that we work with has to handle those trillion number of volumes of calls. All of that also happens in the real time, so the system has to scale up to spikes. Sometimes during holiday season and all that, we see quite a lot of spikes going in. The system has to manage all those spikes and CA has been able to do that.

The technical support has been good. They have dedicated technical support for us, we have dedicated account managers from CA, as well as specialists. It's great to have those kind of partnerships with CA.

I'll definitely give it 8.5. Whether they can put up the solutions that we want, that's number 1. How long they would take, is it going to provide value addition at this point of time or in the future would we have to invest in technology dollars in order to improve that? What is the pricing? What's the scalability? What's the uptime? All those features. It's been very good.

I think CA's API Management technology is in the top 3 in the industry. It depends upon what kind of things you're looking for or what kind of features you're looking for.

The most valuable features of the solution is the gateway and the power of the gateway. The CA solution, as far as how it rates with other products in the marketplace, gives you one of the most robust sets of gateway functionality and security capabilities out of the box in a configurable fashion. Instead of having to actually write code to achieve those things, the CA Layer 7 product gives you the ability to actually configure a very broad range of capabilities and policies directly out of the box.

If it's implemented correctly and you take advantage of some of the capabilities, like the ability to use APIM on the side and integrate that in with policies, it removes a lot of the weight of building all of those rules into the underlying services. It allows you to escalate that up and put that into policy management that can be managed in real time, which creates a faster move to market with capabilities.

Based on a lot of the other tools in the marketplace, the user interface itself is more linear and programmatic based. For a developer it seems to be a very natural interface, but for someone that you'd like to get in there, just doing more configuration, I think there's an opportunity there.

It's enterprise class software. It gives you the ability to scale and load balance, and based on how the technology is being managed today using a database as an underlying component that allows you to synchronize multiple gateways to the database. And then the ability to cluster the data technology. It can scale as much as you need to scale.

The initial setup and the configuration is relatively straightforward. I think the more challenging aspect of it is, like any solution that's an enterprise scale solution, is just getting the base infrastructure agreed upon, configured and implemented. Once that's accomplished it's very easy to configure and set up.

Looking at broad capabilities, looking at stability of the company, today you need to look at vendors that are staying up with the demands of the market and where the market is heading, and making sure that the improvements being made to the software are in line with that. I think it's important to look at vendors that are releasing more than twice a year so that you can see rapid deployment of technology.

It depends on the customer and the industry. Typically, the customers are choosing CA because of the broad capabilities of the gateway, the performance of the gateway; the gateway is one of the top performing gateways in the market, and security. It's absolutely the best security product in the market from a gateway perspective.

I give it a 9, because everybody's got room for improvement. I would definitely recommend the product. As you start looking at releasing APIs, some of the biggest concerns that we have are performance, because consumption is based on how usable the API is. When you start looking at the architecture that CA has put together in giving you the ability to cache information from the front side request, cache information from the back side request, and then create your own caching capabilities to improve that performance, that is a huge benefit and a huge consideration in making a product determination.