Did you know that the phrase “the king is dead, long live the king” is over 600 years old? It first recorded in France following the succession of Charles VII after the death of his father Charles VI in 1422.

But you’re not here for a history lesson, but bare with me and let’s stay with the phrase just for a bit longer. This unusual phrase “the king is dead, long live the king” is unique in its meaning where it signifies the end of something, but at the same time the beginning of something new, while at the same communicating continuation.

In other words, we might have a new king, but we still have a KING - the KINGDOM continues to live. 

Similarly, we’re not saying API Management is going away any time soon. It obviously still is a significant category which is evident by Gartner’s Hype Cycles for API Management and API Observability.

However, kingdoms in their essence, eventually crumbled and suddenly we have presidents, prime ministers an parliaments. They didn’t go away completely, however their significance for day-to-day governship has greatly diminished. It was replaced - not all at once - it took some time and unfortunately a couple of revolutions and wars - but eventually it happened. 

Main Takeways

• API Management isn’t disappearing, but it’s evolving: Just like monarchies gave way to modern governance, today’s API Management must adapt to new demands.
• Legacy solutions are costly and cumbersome: Existing gateways and monitoring tools may work, but they’re often expensive, hard to maintain, and disconnected across teams.
• Modern teams need “API Intelligence”: Beyond standard management tasks, organizations require real-time insights, governance, and discoverability across large, globally distributed teams. 
• Unifying and Federated Platforms: Organizations are on the look out for tools and platforms that can federate data into one central place from which they could implement governance and security initiatives. 
• AI is enabling a paradigm shift: AI, as it is today, can already be used to quickly connect data from multiple gateways in some API management solution, making it easy to solve API discovery and integrations. AI itself is powered and made possible by APIs, and this makes APIs even more important for the future of tech development.
• This isn’t a total replacement: API Intelligence complements (not necessarily replaces) existing management tools like Datadog and Postman—allowing a gradual shift towards more efficient, organization-wide solutions.

Is API Management as cost-effective as it could be?

If you watched the popular Netflix series “The Crown” there’s a scene where they are talking about their royal yacht that has fallen in disrepair. For the Queen it has sentimental value and she sees value and tradition in it.

She wants to preserve it no matter the cost. However, the modern state she is surrounded by, where people need healthcare, modern infrastructure and what-not, simply cannot find a reason to keep giving money for a thing, that is in their eyes, just luxury. 

API Management companies are not here since yesterday. They have been around long enough to become powerful public companies. Many of them were built on what we might call, from today's perspective, old technologies. They worked at the time and they still do work.

The Queen's royal yacht could still fare the seas too. It just became too dangerous and too expensive to keep it at peek running condition. Think of this analogy next time you are paying a DataDog bill.

What is API Management - the Internet Definition

Google or any other glorified answering machine like ChatGPT, Gemini and others will give you pretty good answers. But, definitions like these are often too ideal and things just don’t work like that on an operational level of an organization. 

These people, let’s call them operators, are hands-on people who have to make decisions quickly, research problems, debug, make an API secure and compliant, test, deploy, integrate, make sure everything works, and so on. 

If the organization is big enough, it might have tens, hundreds and yes, even thousands of teams working on various projects where they need to build an API or integrate with an external one. That all comes with its own sets of problems. So, sure (talking to you Internet):

API management includes:

• Designing: Creating APIs 
• Publishing: Making APIs available 
• Monitoring: Tracking how APIs are used 
• Securing: Protecting APIs from unauthorized access 
• Analyzing: Gathering and interpreting data about API usage 
• Troubleshooting: Identifying and fixing issues with APIs

That’s great, but how do we manage all of that from one place across hundreds of teams? How do we keep our teams' consistency and skill levels at a mature level? 

In an organization with hundreds or thousands of developers and engineers, it’s very likely that some of these teams don’t even know the other one even exists. 

But, team “A” might have actually developed an API that team “Z” on the other side of the world needs. They are both using management and the monitoring tools, but completely different ones. 

So, Internet, how do we manage this? Is it even manageable? We have a suggestion to solve this and other problems like API governance, API compliance, and even the (up to now) illusive API discoverability. We call it… 

API Intelligence: Management of the Future

We’ve already written our take on what API Intelligence even is and how we currently see it. Let us try and be impartial here. Let’s start with a couple of quotes.

The first one is from Mehdi Medjaoui, Founder & Chairman of Apidays Conference and GenerationAI Conference:

“... for very large. organizations, and especially companies that operate in multiple locations and time zones, governance needs to move from distributing principles to collecting advice. This essentially reverses the typical central governance model.

Instead of telling teams what to do, the primary role of the central governance comittee becomes to collect experience information from the field, find correlations, and echo back guidance that reflects "best practice" within the wider organization.”

The well-known API Evangelist Kin Lane said in one of his recent articles:

"The problem is that full lifecycle API Management providers have used these core capabilities which we all need to lure us in, but then begin picking and choosing from a whole mix of what I would consider to be platform capabilities–bundling them in with gateway capabilities to simultaneously sweeten but also confuse the bag of solutions you are signing a 1-5 year contract for.”

So, since we are calling this Intelligence, let’s try to approach the problem of management intelligently. 

We are not proposing that your teams need to change gateways or platforms. The reality is that this would take an enormous effort on an organisational level, and you would be pushing something that not all teams necessarily even need. 

The problems we’ve seen and heard 

1. API Discovery and Integrations: How do we make it so that our disconnected teams adopt in-house technologies, in this case APIs, without using too many resources and without the need for a bunch of meetings and go-betweens? 

2. API Governance and Security: How do we ensure that APIs being designed meet our internal rules and compliances before they are pushed to production? 

Although these problems all seem partly like communication or team collaboration problems, in reality, you cannot expect a team of 1000 or more (in some cases more than 10 thousand) developers to communicate with each other without creating noise and confusion. 

The solution

That’s, where you need to “collect experience information from the field” as Mehdi put it, or in other words, you need to “collect intelligence from the field”. 

Is there such a thing? Well, yeah, Treblle does this for your entire API Landscape. But this is not a product pitch. You can find out more about Treblle if you want on our website.

We are talking about a potential paradigm shift that is largely helped by the dawn of AI, where tools such as Treblle can not just, interconnect teams and put the whole API landscape in a catalog, it can now help these teams discover the APIs they need and integrate with them in minutes.

Teams simply don’t know what they don’t know. With the help of AI, they are able to search, identify, and execute, while from an organizational level, the platform constantly analyzes whether the APIs are following the preset rules and compliances. 

This doesn’t mean you are going to stop using the Datadogs and Postmans of the world. At least not right away. API Gateways, even less so. 

Just as an example; Treblle integrates with any of the gateways out there and enriches the observability data inside the gateways themselves, while on the Treblle platform, you get all of your APIs from that gateway discovered, catalogued and analyzed for quality, security and performance.

We’ve written about our Gateway integration with Traefik. Companies with a big number of APIs have tasked their leadership roles to try and find an elegant solution for API Governance. Tools that can give them an easy way to enforce rules and and easy to understand way to see if those rules are being followed might have the edge.

Our own way of addressing this (without going to much into technical details in this blog) results in our platform giving you easy to understand scorecards for 4 main categories: API Performance, API Security, API Design and AI Ready. It is analyzed against industry best practices, however, you can impose your own rules if there (as there always are) exceptions and specifics for your needs.

The full power of this is available on Treblle, but if you want to just test how it works, looks and feels, there is a free, no login required tool where you can just upload your (or any) open API Spec (OAS) and try it out in seconds called API Insights. 

The Winds of Change in Tech are Blowing

We live in exciting times. Not everything is super positive, but exciting nonetheless. Gen AI survived its initial hype, and we are now entering a new hot topic - AI Agents.

An AI company from the other side of the world makes a new LLM, and suddenly there’s a new crisis in the tech sector. You don’t need to seek to deep to realize all of these new AIs and LLMs are powered by APIs. The winds of change are definitely blowing and who knows where we will end up when it is all said and done.

There is a lot of books and discussions on how to approach AI and API Management. A lot of books and theories is also an indicator that we as an industry still did not figure things out completely and that this is very much a rapidly evolving space.

Just to illustrate this point, did you see any new books on gravity? No! Humans as a society figured that one out ages ago. No need for new books. 

How to manage API teams in a period of hyper-innovation driven by the AI revolution? That is the question.

Our pitch, as we have already said, is API Intelligence!