Mark O'Neill

One really neat feature in the Vordel Application Gateway is the ability to schedule reports on API and Web Service usage. You can schedule reports to run on a regular basis, and have the results emailed to the user in PDF format, just like Google Analytics. These reports include summary values at the top (for example, the number of requests, SLA breaches, alerts triggered, and unique clients in a specified week) followed by a table of APIs and Services, and their aggregated usage data (for example, the number of requests on each API or Web Service). It is quite simple to configure this with the Vordel Application Gateway. Just right-click the Listeners -> Vordel Reporter node in the Policy Studio tree, and follow the configuration steps which are listed here on the Vordel Extranet: https://extranet.vordel.com/documentation2/VG6/common/tutorials/reporter_scheduled_r... (more)

Who manages Application Gateways?

Because Application Gateways touch on a number of areas of functionality, including networking and security, a very common question is "Who manages an Application Gateway?". To answer the question, take a step back and think about what an Application Gateway is. An Application Gateway takes tasks such as application integration and application security and it moves them into a piece of network infrastructure (which may be virtual or physical). By moving these tasks out of applications and onto the network, you make the tasks run faster, and easier to manage since they are now dec... (more)

Three Cloud Computing Case Studies

When an organization says they are "using the cloud", it can mean a number of very different things. Using an IaaS service such as Amazon EC2 or Terremark is different from using Google Apps for outsourced email, which is different again from exposing an API into Facebook. So here is a video of three Cloud Computing case studies from Vordel 's customers. They cover one each of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. In first two examples, customers are connecting up to the Cloud; firstly to Google Apps (for single-sign-on to Google Apps email) and secondly to Terremark to manage virtual servers. In... (more)

Kin Lane's API Management Service Provider Roundup for 2011 covers Vordel

Vordel is featured in Kin Lane's First Dimension of API Management Service Providers. It's a really good round-up of the current state of play, as we start 2012. Kin mentions that: One thing to know about these API management service providers is, well...they are API management service providers. To my knowledge they don’t actually deploy your API for you, they help you build a strategy, and manage the API. But you still need to rely on other tools and in-house resources to deliver your API. This is where I'd disagree slightly. In the case of an API Gateway, it can also be used a... (more)

Returning JSON fault information to JQuery-based API clients

Since many APIs are called by JavaScript libraries like JQuery, it's convenient to return fault information as JSON so that it can be easily read by the client. The object is then parsed to retrieve the reason for the fault. Some APIs make this easy, such as the Rackspace Cloud Identity API which allow faults to be returned as JSON or XML. But in many cases, you have to laboriously configure this JSON conversiona yourself [For example, in the case of WCF, Iain Mitchell has a good blog post about how it can be made to return JSON formatted faults for consumption by JQuery.] A Gate... (more)