Application Synchronization to support Identity and Access Management Policy

For Microgateway to support the Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies it is necessary that Microgateway has the recently updated applications from the API Gateway instance from where the applications were provisioned. Microgateway provides a mechanism to synchronize applications between API Gateway and Microgateway to support the IAM policy.

During API provisioning the applications are pulled from the API Gateway instance into Microgateway. After provisioning these applications in Microgateway, these applications have to be in synchronization with those in the API Gateway from where they were provisioned so that any changes in the applications in the API Gateway instance is reflected in the Microgateway. This helps the IAM policy for an API in Microgateway executes with the latest applications instead of verifying against the stale application data.

Application synchronization in Microgateway is achieved through a polling mechanism. To avoid the consumption of a considerable amount of memory and CPU, the API Provider provides certain configurations for polling the applications to minimize the memory and CPU utilization. The polling can be done for the below parameters:

List of application ids

All registered applications of the APIs in Microgateway

All global applications

A property applicationstoSync is added where the user specifies registeredapplication, all, or comma separated ids.

Some considerations during the application synchronization:

Microgateway is provisioned with this configuration before start up.

Only one thread runs for synchronization.

On crash of thread execution, it starts again.

A timestamp of the last synchronized application is maintained in the Microgateway so that the next polling would be for applications updated > timestamp

A property to specify polling interval is added.

A property to enable or disable synchronization is added.