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by culo 4004 days ago
API management is not big. Is under $500M/year [1] - plus most of the features are becoming commodities. Take a look at the open source KONG API gateway [2]

[1]https://www.forrester.com/Sizing+The+Market+For+API+Manageme...

[2] https://github.com/mashape/kong

3 comments

It's still an interesting proposition for new development... front end published to S3/Cloudfront, with the backend running in Lambda responders, and an API layer using this for a communication bridge... full scale flexibility with very low administrative overhead...

At a larger size, it may be more expensive than a roll your own, but for an independent idea that you just want to build something as a software/service and if successful be able to scale and handle extra load, it isn't a bad idea.

This is really the missing piece to Lambda in my mind... though being able to act as a bridge for legacy SOAP/WS-* services is pretty nice too. I've written a lot of pretty small node service that act as a bridge to SOAP based services the past few years... though most of those have been for internal use, and not sure how well that translates here.

Agreed that it's moving down the value chain, many other open source projects out there doing similar things. There's also Tyk Open Source API Gateway (https://tyk.io) and API Umbrella (http://apiumbrella.io/), and APIAxle, though that's been around for a while now.

Also API market is intended to grow to $660 million in US by 2020 and over a billion worldwide (http://blogs.forrester.com/michael_yamnitsky/15-06-07-the_ap...). So it's definetely not small.

Is small from a VC prospective. Especially in 2015-2020. Everything under 1B is tiny. Plus, when there are soo many players you will end up fighting like crazy just the get bread crumbs.
In web scraping industry, can confirm.
there is no real active development on apiaxle and api umbrella is low looking at their pulse.
quick side question, what software market have avoided becoming commoditized?