Introduction to the InterSystems API Manager (IAM) Version 3.0

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) allows you to take advantage of microservices and APIs that are either exposed or consumed by your InterSystems IRIS® applications. Acting as an API gateway between your InterSystems IRIS servers and applications, it gives you the ability to more effectively monitor and control the traffic of calls between your server-side APIs and your client-side applications. IAM enables you to monitor, control, and govern HTTP-based API traffic.

The more distributed your environment, the more critical it becomes to properly govern and monitor your API traffic. IAM enables you to easily route all your traffic through a centralized gateway and forward API requests to appropriate target nodes.

The InterSystems API Manager is powered by Kong Gateway Version 3.0, an industry-leading API manager from Kong, Inc. While the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC)Opens in a new tab provides support for IAM, the main source of information about IAM is the https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/3.0.x/Opens in a new tab. InterSystems provides information about installing and upgrading IAM, along with some details about the IAM environment.

For information on other versions of IAM, see InterSystems API Manager (IAM)Opens in a new tab.

Note:

In this article, InterSystems IRIS® refers to any InterSystems product based on InterSystems IRIS that supports IAM. This includes InterSystems IRIS for Health and HealthShare® Health Connect.

Benefits of Using IAM

IAM allows you to do the following:

Monitor your HTTP-based API traffic to find out:
- Which developers or applications are using your APIs
- What APIs are being called and which ones are most popular
- How often your APIs are being called
- Which APIs could benefit from a rework
- If there are any patterns or trends

Control who is using your APIs and restrict usage in various ways. From simple access restrictions to throttling API traffic and fine-tuning request payloads, you have fine-grained control and can react quickly.
Protect your APIs with central security mechanisms like OAuth2.0 or Key Token Authentication.
Onboard third-party developers and provide them with a superb developer experience right from the start by providing a dedicated Developer Portal for their needs.
Scale your API demands and deliver low-latency responses.
Provide a uniform API for underlying services that have different APIs.
Blue-green deployments.
Canary releases.

Note:

IAM provided with InterSystems IRIS must be used only for APIs that are either provided by InterSystems IRIS or used by InterSystems IRIS.

Learning About IAM

The IAM Version 3.0 documentation provided by InterSystems includes:

For documentation of previous IAM releases, see InterSystems API Manager (IAM)Opens in a new tab.

See the https://docs.konghq.com/gateway/3.0.x/Opens in a new tab for details on using IAM.

For additional information about IAM, see the InterSystems Developer Community articleOpens in a new tab and the InterSystems online learning siteOpens in a new tab. The online learning site has online classes, videos and documents that cover topics on IAM, such as building FHIR applications and best practices. On the online learning site, search for API Manager to find these resources.