Secure and Automate API Operations ​with NGINX | RSAC Virtual 2024

Hello everyone and welcome to this webinar. My name is Fabric Roci and I'm an solution architect at, at five. In this session, we will discuss challenges and opportunities in the a p space and how Nginx as an API gateway provides security, manageability and visibility in infrastructure agnostic environments.

APIs are now at the core of digital business as organizations of all sizes have adopted APIs to improve connectivity and to build composable architectures. API requests comprise 83% of all internet traffic today and API calls and will growing 300% faster than overall web traffic. According to estimates by fives office of the CTO, the number of APIs in production will increase exponentially over the next few years.

By 2030, there could be anywhere from 500 million to more than a billion. APIs in production APIs pro happens when API become widely distributed without the holistic strategy that includes governance and best practices. Some contributing factors include the adoption of microservices CICD practices and increasing complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

When API gained widespread adoption in the early two thousands, uh, we were primarily viewed as a technical solution enabling applications to connect and exchange data. This is often the first use case we see in many organizations undergoing digital transformation. Unlocking data.

By easing access to information, you can let your user or customers easily build integrations around your product or you can improve cross team data sharing and collaboration between various teams. As companies undergo transformation, they often refactor monolithic applications into microservices. APIs play a key role in the microservices work by enabling seamless communication.

APIs are synchron faster to develop and maintain. They provide a better fault isolation and resiliency, and they enable apps to scale easily. Finally, APIs also provide new opportunities to create better customer experiences and are increasingly recognized as a major driver of innovation, venue creation, and rarely from digital marketplaces and entertainment apps to the internet of feed and IT microservices.

All APIs are at the heart of how the world conducts business. To fully realize the economic and technical advantages of APIs, we must first address a significant obstacle. APIs follow The a k first methodology, emphasizes clarity and transparency from the outset, and RT is to establish a shared understanding of the systems requirements, thus reducing complexity and ambiguity that can lead to issues down the line.

A well-defined API contract serves as a cornerstone for collaboration, enabling different stakeholders, including developers, testers, and product manager to work cohesively and enhancing productivity and minimizing misunderstandings that typically arise from poor communication by the company frontend and backend development tasks. An API first approach not only accelerates the development process, but also facilitates a more agile response to market demands, allowing organizations to pivot quickly and introduce innovation, uh, ahead of competitors. Embedding security protocols in the API design phase means that security is not a retrofit, but becomes an integral part of the development life cycle, leading to more secure and products and instilling greater confidence among users and giants.

The proactive testing and validation of the API contract. Also resilience in software applications, ensuring they can handle a wide spectrum of user interactions and system stresses, thus avoiding costly downtime and bolstering the overall reliability of the software services that provided. By leveraging the open API specification, uh, organizations can create a common language for describing APIs, which simplifies collaboration by ensuring that everyone involved in the design, development and operational phases is aligned with a standardized set of guidelines and protocols.

NG X plays a critical role in the API lifecycle by providing a secure and reliable platform for Deploy ETS with features such as TLS termination rate authentication and more ensuring that APIs are protected against common threats and vulnerabilities beyond security. Gin Xs in d observability and management of API through logging real time monitoring and load balancing capabilities, which are essential for distributing API traffic efficiently and maintaining high availability and performance under varying load conditions. The Five Eng, uh, provides a robust solution for managing API infrastructures, allowing you to secure your operations, automate through the tasks and effortlessly scale to meet the demands of your growing business.

By utilizing AG Engineer XAPI management capabilities, you can streamline your workflow, reducing the complexity of your systems while simul simultaneously and enhancing the security measures in place to protect your data service. D-H-G-F-A-P-I Gateway is engineered to maintain high performance reliability even under the strain of heavy traffic loads. This ensure that your API services remain responsible, available, providing a seamless experience for end users without compromising on speed or uptime.

With the advanced monitoring tools over by Engine X, you gain critical insights into your API gateway traffic patterns and configuration status. This visibility empowers you to make informed decisions to optimize your setups and to troubleshoot issues more effectively across the entirety of your API. Landscape engineers also emphasizes to awareness as security within its API management framework.

It allows for a governance model that provides comprehensive oversight while still affording developers, um, the, the flexibility and the to manage their APIs efficiently. Additionally, NGINX secures features, uh, including fine-grained authorization, access control and finity ensure that your API endpoints are safeguarded against unauthorized access and abuse and preserving the integrity and confidentiality of your services. API security is not just a concern of a single team, but it's a rather collective responsibility shared across different departments within an organization.

As the last tip of cyber festivals, companies are recognizing the importance of integrated security early in development cycle, which has led to the adoption of a so-called Ship Nest strategy. This approach is part of the broader DevSecOps movement machines to blend security practices with DevOps processes. The four pillars of the SecOps serve as the foundation for this integrated approach.

Governance is critical as it set the security standard and policies that guide development operations ensuring that security considerations are not an effect but a core component of our activities. Continuous monitoring of these practices helps maintain security posture and compliance. People are essential to the success of Jec course.

As collaborations between security expert and the DevOps team is crucial for breaking down traditional silos and fostering a culture where security is everyone's priority as possibility. By working together, all teams can ensure that security measures are understood and implemented effectively throughout the organization. Processes are the backbone of the SecOps orchestrating a seamless workflow that integrates security checks into the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline.

And this integration provides constant feedback, allowing for immediate rectification of potential security issues and ensuring that security is a continuous process rather than a one time event at the very end of the development phase. Lastly, technology plays a pivotal role in DevSecOps by automating repetitive security tasks, which announces efficiency and reduces the risk for you and error. It also involves hardening the development pipeline with tools and practices that are designed to fortify the software against vulnerabilities, ensuring that security is built into the product from the ground up.

EdgeX ensures the continuous protection of APIs during operation by managing and sizing income requests, thereby maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of the API services in real time access control mechanisms are central to this governing the identification and permission of users interacting with API endpoints Natural security fortifies, the API communication channels safeguarding against unauthorized and potentially harm traffic. Application protection actively prevents API misuse by identifying counteracting known attack patterns, ensuring the API resilience through threat protection, sche mobilization, and grading real tire visibility into its operational health. Nginx App Protect web application firewall is a native model available for Nginx Plus and Nix open source, and it includes a feature to help secure those APIs that might have slipped into production.

That feature being the ability to import and pars an open API specification file within engine X and automatically creates C cars to block any requests that are not explicitly allowed by the open api. The WAF can be co-located with the engine XAPI gateway, so there are one less hope for API traffic reducing bot latency and complexity instead of taking a reactive approach and blocking a request potentially identified as dangerous. A GX Protect takes a proactive approach and blocks all requests that are not exclusively identified as secure.

You can deploy Nix protective wherever you can deploy nGenx, including of course within the API gateway. Five. Ingenix Protect WA leverages the sophisticated five advanced web technology to deliver persistence and robust three PI security effectively blocking a wide range of attacks, uh, and protecting against potential service disruptions.

By integrating this powerful web application firewall, organizations can enforce string security controls, ensuring their APIs are resilient against threats and helping to maintain continuous at time. Gin. X plus as an API gateway excels at securing and streamlining API interactions by offering robust authentication options like Open Connect to the zero and job token validation.

This allows for a tailored approach to API cause authentication and resource access control for the lower engines API traffic management through features like Relativity Traffic shaping and more. And it also secures backend services using TLS encryption and multiple TLS encryption course policy management and the option to integrate with a protect WAF for, uh, additional defense EngineX when configured as an API gateway. Then provide comprehensive visibility into API traffic by allowing the configuration of detailed log formats and the exportation metrics through monitoring tools such as promeus, raf OL, and others.

Nix ca Gateway delivers both security and efficiency and is adaptable for any specific requirement with this flexible configuration options. It's of course diverse deployment environments from cloud to edge, from containerized to monolithic, integrate seamlessly with devs practices and provides comprehensive traffic insight for superior API monitoring and observability. I want to thank all of you for attending our webinar today, our ING and automating API operations with the five Eng Engine X.

This now concludes our presentation. com. Thank you.