API plans

Starting from the release 18.1.5 a new feature is introduced to the API Platform called Plans.

As illustrated in the following diagram, plans are used to handle entitlements to one or many APIs such as client applications can subscribe to a given plan and through it, gain access to all APIs associated with it:

Oracle APIP CS–API plans

In releases prior 18.1.5, API managers have to first publish each API to the developer portal before developers can discover and subscribe them to client applications.

From release 18.1.5 onwards, a plan can be created in the management portal that entitles (grants access) to any given API. Once this is done, an API manager can publish the plan to the developer portal (as opposed to just the inpidual API) so sub-sequentially, developers can discover and subscribe to the plan via the developer portal.

Because plans effectively act as a unit-of-visibility to all APIs associated with it, they provide a great mechanism to apply common quality-of-service controls, like for example, limit the total number of calls that can, within a given timeframe, be collectively made to APIs within the plan:

Plans also play an important role in enabling the so-called API economy. If properly implemented, a plan can act as act as an accounting log of who/when/which/how many times any given API within the plan was consumed. With such information at hand, monetizing on APIs (term known as API monetization) becomes more a business strategy question as the core technology building blocks would be in placed to enable such business capability.

This section was courtesy of Ricardo Ferreira from the Oracle A-Team and Black Belt instructor for the Oracle API Platform.