How to Deal with Uncertainties in API Deployment?

During API deployment, numerous uncertainties can arise. Despite rigorous testing and multiple preventive measures, unexpected issues may still occur in the production environment, such as network latency, server hardware or software failures, configuration errors, and code version conflicts.

To effectively address these potential risks and ensure a smooth deployment with minimal adverse impact, we need to implement a series of preventive and responsive measures. This article discusses the significant roles API7 Enterprise can play in the API deployment process.

How to Manage and Differentiate Deployment Environments?

1. Gateway Groups: A common approach to eliminating uncertainties in API deployment is the principle of immutability, where configuration and environment variables of the service environment cannot be arbitrarily changed. In API7 Enterprise, users can create multiple gateway groups, each representing an actual service deployment environment that may include several gateway instances handling traffic.

Users need to first create service templates, which consist of multiple routes. A service is an abstract collection based on actual business needs, such as order-related services. Routes within a service are the APIs, like adding an order, querying an order, deleting an order, etc. These routes include matching paths for the API and additional processing logic on the gateway.

1. Version Control: Deploying a service template to a gateway group is essentially performing API deployment. When deploying a service template to a gateway group, a version number unique to the current gateway group must be specified. Strict version control ensures that each deployed service version is distinct and immutable. Once a service version is deployed, it should not be modified. Therefore, API7 Enterprise imposes operational restrictions on published services, preventing any addition or modification of routes within published services; it is a read-only configuration. If changes are needed, they should be made in the template and a new version should be published.

2. Testing Environment: Before deploying services to a gateway group, testing can be conducted in a testing environment. Users can first deploy the created service templates to a testing gateway group, where they can test features like route configurations, access controls, and rate limiting, and ensure that business logic is executed correctly.

Additionally, users can deliberately introduce delays and errors to test API behavior under abnormal conditions using the fault-injection plugin. After testing, the service in the testing environment can be synchronized to the production environment, ensuring that all configurations, except the environment, remain consistent.

How to Handle Operational Errors in the System?

For API deployment, while decisions might require consensus from the entire team, there will ultimately be some deployers to execute the deployment. The engineers for deployment can be crucial part of the process. Typically, API deployments should be executed by trusted and experienced engineers who are familiar with the system architecture and deployment environment, ensuring they can handle issues calmly during deployment.

1. IAM Policies: In actual system operations, actions affecting production stability are not limited to deployment. From enabling/disabling services, adjusting route matching rules, to modifying settings in the upstream service registry, each step can be a potential risky. To ensure the security and control of API deployment and subsequent operations, implementing fine-grained permission configurations is crucial. API7 Enterprise offers IAM policies that help organizations precisely control who can access which resources, minimizing each user's permissions and preventing unauthorized users from mistakenly operating sensitive resources.

2. Audit Logging: All system operations can be viewed in audit logs, including when, where, and how they were performed. If an error occurs in the system, the specific executor, execution time, and method can be quickly identified, providing strong evidence for problem tracing and responsibility allocation. This not only helps in promptly correcting errors and preventing further escalation but also establishes an effective supervision mechanism within the organization, encouraging each member to handle their operational permissions and responsibilities with greater caution.

3. Version Rollback: Version rollback is an indispensable part of API deployment, ensuring that when a newly deployed version encounters issues, it can be quickly and safely reverted to a previously stable version. API7 Enterprise offers version rollback functionality. Users only need to select the historical version they wish to revert to and execute the rollback operation. The system will automatically replace the service version in the gateway group with the specified historical version. During this process, all configurations and environment variables will be restored to the state of the historical version, ensuring the stability and consistency of the service environment.

What If the Number of API Requests Suddenly Surges Post-Deployment?

1. Plugin Mechanism: API7 Enterprise offers a rich set of plugins, which can help you effectively prevent and respond to sudden surges in API requests. For instance, rate limiting plugins (limit-req and limit-count) control request rates and numbers to prevent service overload, circuit breaking plugins (api-breaker) automatically cut off requests when backend services fail to protect system stability, and caching plugins (proxy-cache) cache frequently accessed data to reduce backend service pressure. You can configure plugins at either the gateway group or service route level based on specific business needs, and the plugins will take effect as the request traffic passes through.

2. Load Balancing: API7 Enterprise supports load balancing for gateway instances and upstream nodes. Load balancing distributes a large number of network requests across multiple servers or server clusters to achieve balanced load, improve overall system processing capacity, and enhance fault tolerance. API7 Enterprise Edition supports various load balancing strategies, ensuring stable system operation under high concurrency scenarios.

3. Health Checks: Health checks are essential for ensuring the normal status of upstream service nodes. By regularly detecting the health status of upstream nodes, the gateway automatically marks nodes as unhealthy and stops forwarding requests to them when probes detect abnormalities. Simultaneously, the system redirects traffic to other healthy nodes according to the configured load balancing strategy, avoiding service interruption.

4. Monitoring and Alerts: API7 Enterprise provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting features. By monitoring API performance metrics and key data in real-time, such as request rate, response time, and error rate, you can quickly understand the API's operational status and identify potential issues in time. When API performance anomalies or preset thresholds are reached, the system triggers alert notifications via email or Webhook, ensuring relevant personnel can promptly respond and handle the situation. This real-time monitoring and alerting mechanism helps reduce response time and improve system stability and availability.

How to Minimize Uncertainty and Errors in Manual Deployment?

1. Open APIs: API7 Enterprise offers a complete set of open APIs and related API documentation, including explanations of each API request parameter, request examples, IAM permissions related to the API, and error information corresponding to different response status codes, helping you quickly understand and integrate APIs into automated workflows.

2. Declarative Configuration Tools: If you use GitOps, a code-based declarative API configuration approach, you can also use the declarative configuration tool ADC (APISIX Declarative CLI) provided by API7.ai to achieve GitOps capabilities seamlessly integrated into your CI/CD pipeline.

Summary

API7 Enterprise offers comprehensive and effective solutions to the uncertainties in the API deployment process through its powerful multi-gateway group management, version control, testing environment verification, as well as complete permission management and version rollback mechanisms, helping enterprises achieve efficient, stable, and secure API service deployment and management.