Why Publish APIs?
After you build your APIs, you have to publish them to make the APIs available for consumption by developers and consumers. Publishing an API enables developers and consumers to consume the functionalities exposed through your API. They can then integrate the functionalities, the APIs provide, into applications easily. Creating and developing an API in API Gateway does not make it accessible to your users. You must first activate the API before publishing it to a portal so that the gateway endpoint is available for developers and consumers to invoke the API.
API Gateway allows you to publish APIs to Developer Portal from where they are available for consumption by developers and consumers.
Optionally, API Gateway also allows you to publish the APIs to the following destinations:
Service registries. This enables applications to dynamically locate an API Gateway instance that can process that API.
Integration Server. This is used in API first implementation approach.
In addition to publishing, API Gateway provides you with capabilities to customize your APIs before publishing them. You can customize APIs depending on how you want to restrict exposure of specific information the APIs handle as follows:
Restrict the exposure of specific resources, methods, and operations of an API to other applications.
Define a custom gateway endpoint by customizing the URL of the gateway endpoint. Consumers can use the customized URL to access the API.
The following sections describe how you can activate an API, customize the gateway endpoint, and publish APIs to different destinations.
