About this Release

WSO2 API Manager is a platform for creating, managing, consuming, and monitoring APIs. It employs proven SOA best practices to solve a wide range of API management challenges such as API provisioning, API governance, API security, and API monitoring. It combines some of the most powerful and mature components of the WSO2's state-of-the-art Carbon platform to deliver a smooth and end-to-end API management experience while catering to both API publisher and API consumer requirements.

WSO2 API Manager comprises of the following modules:

  • API Publisher: Allows API creators to design, implement, and document APIs and allows API product managers to manage the lifecycle of APIs and create API products by using one or more APIs.

  • Developer Portal: A portal for onboarding application creators. It allows application creators to discover, subscribe, test and consume APIs through their applications.

  • API Gateway: Allows access to APIs/services by routing application traffic to the relevant endpoints. The API Gateway is the component that enforces security, rate-limiting and transformations on API requests while feeding valuable information of these requests to API Analytics.

  • Key Manager: The security token service of the API Manager which is responsible for handling everything related to authentication and authorization of API requests. It supports a wide variety of security protocols such as OAuth2.0/OIDC, Basic Auth, API Key, SAML based single-sign-on.

  • Traffic Manager: Controls the traffic flow of the API gateway. This is used to apply request quotas on APIs for monetization, access control or security-related matters. In addition to configuring the available policies, users can deploy their own policies on the traffic manager which will control the rate of traffic on the API gateways.

  • API Analytics: Monitors all traffic that's routed through the API gateways to analyze usage patterns, SLA violations, consumer behaviors, to provide business insights and so on.

For more information on WSO2 API Manager, see the overview in the WSO2 API Manager 3.2.0 documentation and go to the product page on WSO2 API Manager on the WSO2 website.

What is new in this release

The WSO2 API Manager 3.2.0 is the latest WSO2 API Manager release and is the successor of WSO2 API Manager 3.1.0. It contains the following new features and enhancements:

  • Multiple Third-party Key Manager support

    Until API Manager 3.1.0, the only possible way to extend the key management functionality was to configure WSO2 Identity Server. But with this new feature, WSO2 API Manager supports multiple third-party key managers such as Okta and Keycloak. This offers more flexibility when integrating with third-party identity management systems. All tokens and keys will be managed by the respective third-party key manager.

  • Inbuilt workflow support

    API Manager 3.2.0 supports in-built workflow approvals. It is specifically designed to facilitate a simple approval/rejection process without integrating with a business process server. The Approval Workflow Executor can be enabled for application creation, subscription creation, application key generation, user self sign up, and API state change.

  • Test console for API Publisher

    The new test Console in the API Publisher allows you to try out APIs from the API Publisher. API creators and publishers can verify functions and behaviors and fix issues before publishing them to the Gateway and making it available for subscribers.

  • Query complexity analysis for GraphQL APIs

    WSO2 API Manager introduces the Static Query Analyser to which can be used to protect the backend endpoint from GraphQL queries that are more complex than a specified depth limit. Since GraphQL APIs offer the flexibility to fetch data using expensive queries, users might send requests with complex queries. Sometimes, this will create a significant workload for the backend and make it vulnerable to DOS attacks (in the worst case). With this feature, the API Manager server will analyze the complexity of the query before sending it to the backend and will make sure that the backend is safe from complex queries.

  • Support for exposing OAuth 2.0 secure endpoints

    WSO2 API Manager 3.2.0 supports OAuth 2.0 Endpoint Security out-of-the-box. An API can be created to access a backend protected using OAuth 2.0 security standards. The required parameters can be specified via the UI.

  • Horizontal Pod Auto-Scaling with Custom-Metrics in the Kubernetes API-Operator

    You can now auto-scale backend or managed API horizontally based on custom metrics. For more information, see the sample scenario (v1.2.0) with detailed configurations in the GitHub page of the K8s API-Operator.

  • Private Jet mode for Microgateways

    WSO2 API Manager now provides cloud-native API management, where users can expose microservices as secure managed APIs in cloud environments with the support of the K8s API-Operator.

  • Gateway Runtime Artifact Synchronizer

    This feature allows you to sync nodes seamlessly in a Multi-Gateway setup with an extension point that can be configured to store these Synapse artifacts in a pre-configured storage location.

  • Git integration support for API Controller

    From API Manager 3.2 onwards, the API Controller can operate on top of a Git repository and identify all the APIs/API Products and application projects that are committed to it. It provides a single command to detect and deploy all the projects to the given environment.

  • Support for API products from API Controller

    The API Controller now supports handling API products in addition to APIs. With this new feature, a CI/CD pipeline can be implemented using API products (a package of APIs or selected resources from multiple APIs).

  • Support for Different Endpoint Types from API Controller
    The API controller supports a wide range of endpoint types in addition to HTTP/REST endpoints. This feature, gives the API controller the ability to not only support HTTP/SOAP endpoints but to also support load balancing, failover, dynamic endpoints, and AWS lambda endpoints.

  • API Lifecycle Status Change Support from API Controller

    API lifecycle status change support in WSO2 API Controller 3.2 provides users the ability to modify the lifecycle status of an API easily without accessing the Publisher UI.

  • API/Application delete support using the API Controller

    WSO2 API Controller 3.2 provides the ability to delete an API/application using a single command, allowing users to easily remove an unwanted API or an application in an environment without signing in to the Publisher or Developer Portal.

  • API Key Authentication support for API Operator

    API key authentication support in API Operator provides a simple authentication scheme that accepts a valid self-contained JWT token issued for accessing APIs.

  • APIKey Restriction for IP and Referrer

    Ability to define authorized parties when generating a token using an IP address restriction or a HTTP referer restriction.

  • Monitoring dashboard for operational statistics

    Having an idea about the overall health status of APIs and services is essential for the proper functioning of an API-driven business. The Monitoring Dashboard helps to achieve this objective by showing contextual information on APIs such as latency, throughput, errors, and traffic volume. Operational and management users can use this dashboard to identify operational errors, narrow down the root cause, or to identify common traffic trends. The overview page provides a holistic view by aggregating different views on APIs, and by using the drill-downs user can get a detailed picture of different perspectives.

  • Dashboard for business analytics

    Significant changes have been done on the Publisher Analytics Dashboard to improve the experience of different audiences. The newly available Business Analytics Dashboard has been created by combining several new widgets with the widgets that initially existed in the Publisher Analytics Dashboard to provide an unrestricted view on the APIs for Managerial users. A user with an internal/analytics role can access the new dashboard to view the statistics for all APIs irrespective of whether those APIs are access-controlled or not. Further, a specific set of widgets chosen from the Publisher Analytics Dashboard has been used to create an API Analytics Dashboard, which now shows a limited set of Statistics relevant to a Publisher. A Publisher can use this dashboard to view the statistics of APIs created by them or visible to them. The Developer portal Dashboard has been renamed to the Application Analytics Dashboard and the Admin Dashboard has been renamed to Reports Dashboard, to reflect their functionality better.

  • API Usage Comparison
    Users can compare multiple APIs on a single screen and get a clear idea about those APIs in various matrices such as the number of API hits

  • Exporting data in CSV, PDF formats

    This new feature is introduced to widgets in order to export data as a CSV or PDF. It supports all the widgets with tabular data. Users can export the current view and can share, analyze, or compare it with different views. It helps to export custom or selected data sets.

  • New alert page in Monitoring Dashboards

    As information related to API availability and alert listing is more related to analytics, it has been moved to the Monitoring Dashboard from the API Manager Admin Portal. It provides an overview of the API availability and filtering based on the availability status. The alert listing widgets have additional improvements to provide filtering and better API-wise comparison. Interactive widgets are provided and support to narrow down alerts.

  • New summary charts for monitoring dashboards

    Summarised information of the API requests is present in these widgets. There are 4 summary widgets to depict the total API invocation count, faulty count, throttled out request count, and highest API latency time within the last 24 hours. These widgets help to identify the above parameters of the system and it also allows users to do a drill-down analysis on appropriate widgets in order to narrow down the issues.

What has changed in this release

Improvements to existing WSO2 API-M features

  • Shared scopes within the tenant

    Adds more improvements for this by supporting shared scopes per tenant and allowing multiple scopes to be attached to each API resource. This feature ensures that only privileged users can create, modify, and manage the shared scopes in a particular tenant space.

  • Re-skinned admin portal UI

    WSO2 API Manager’s Admin Portal has got a whole new and exciting look with the use of ReactJS, which is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. The new Admin Portal UI clearly defines the administrative tasks that can be performed, and it also makes the workflows of API administrators simple and more efficient. It has a dashboard view that shows the summary of the administrative tasks and any pending workflow approvals. This makes it easier for administrators to keep track of pending or already-performed tasks. Similar to the Publisher and Developer Portal, the Admin Portal is a OAuth2.0 client application, which authenticates to the WSO2 API Manager’s backend via Open ID Connect. Users now have the ability to customize and enhance the look and feel of the Admin Portal by extending the React components in the portal.

  • Accessibility compliance of the Developer Portal

    WSO2 API Manager’s Developer Portal now conforms to the Level A and Level AA success criteria of the conformance requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1). This will make content more accessible to a wider range of people.

  • Subscription upgrade

    The subscription tier upgrade feature provides the capability to change the subscription tier of an already existing subscription without having to delete the subscription and resubscribe to the same API.

  • In-Memory subscription validation

    The In-Memory subscription validation provides support to remove runtime dependencies between the Gateway and the Key Manager node and validates the request by accessing the metadata in the In-Memory data store. As a result, WSO2 API Manager can serve the request even in a situation where the database is inaccessible.

  • Mock Response Payload Generation for API Prototyping

    The Mock Response Payload Generation has been improved to allow API Publishers to generate complex inline scripts. This offers consumers the flexibility to obtain any response that is supported by a particular resource of the API. Furthermore, the publishers and consumers no longer have to face the limitation of being able to define and retrieve only a single response per resource.

  • Support for Public Certificate Installation for Secure HTTP Communication for the Controller

    Ability to import SSL certificates related to WSO2 API Manager that are used in different environments. Certificates that are trusted by the operating system, which includes certificates of different Certificate Authority (CA), will be imported by default. If there are any additional certificates needed for controller operations of different environments, they can be imported manually. As a result, any DER or PEM encoded certificates can be imported.

  • Improve Search for an API / Application in Controller

    WSO2 API Controller 3.2 allows users to search for APIs, applications, or API products during the listing process, which can be searched by name, version, provider, context, status, description, subcontext, doc, and label with -q or --query optional flag.

Improvements to existing WSO2 API-M Analytics features

  • Improved charts for interactive presentations The new API Manager 3.2.0 is powered with a collection of interactive charts. These charts allow users to have a detailed view of a specific aspect of the analytics. Moreover, it provides the option to export data in CSV format as well.

Deprecated features and functionalities

  • Admin Portal v0.17 based REST APIs.

  • Implicit Grant

    OAuth 2.1.0 has removed/discouraged the use of Implicit grant type due to security concerns. Therefore, the support for Implicit grant has been removed from WSO2 API Manager. For more information, see OAuth 2.0 Security Best Current Practice.

  • Message Tracing

    The support for this feature will be removed from subsequent versions starting from WSO2 API Manager 4.0.0.

Removed features and functionalities

  • Tag wise grouping

    API categories are used for API grouping, similar to Tag wise grouping. However, the user does not have to go through the hassle of following a naming convention when creating API categories. Therefore, with the introduction of the API categories, the Tag wise grouping feature has been removed.

  • Developer Portal, Publisher, and Admin Portal v0.16 based REST APIs.

  • Developer Portal and Publisher v0.17 based REST APIs.

  • Out-of-the-box support for the opaque access token in the Developer Portal

    Out-of-the-box support to generate an opaque access token via the Developer Portal has been removed. Application Developers can create applications that only generate a JWT type access tokens. Applications that are migrated from older versions, will have the support to generate either an opaque access token or a JWT type access token.

    Similar to previous versions, application developers will get the OAuth2 bearer tokens while generating tokens via the Developer Portal. The only difference is the format of the token as the JWT type token is self-contained.

  • Access token validity period in the Developer Portal

    Access token validity period setting via the Developer Portal has been removed. Refer Changing the Default Token Expiration Time for the new set of configurations.

  • WSO2 Identity Server as a Key Manager

    The prepackaged WSO2 Identity Server as a Key Manager has been removed. When needed, make sure to use WSO2 Identity Server 5.10.0 as the Key Manager.

U2/WUM updates

This section lists out the features that were updated or introduced newly to WSO2 API-M 3.2.0 via U2/WUM updates.

Updated or newly introduced feature The date of the update
Configuring OAuth 2.0 Endpoint Security Using the Parameters File via API Controller (apictl) 8 October, 2021
GraphQL Subscription Operations Support 26 February, 2022

Compatible WSO2 product versions

WSO2 API-M 3.2.0 is based on WSO2 Carbon 4.6.0 and is expected to be compatible with any of the WSO2 products that are based on any Carbon 4.6.x version, except when using WSO2 Identity Server as a Key Manager, you need to specifically use WSO2 Identity Server 5.10.0 when working with WSO2 API-M 3.2.0. If you get any compatibility issues, please contact team WSO2. For information on the third-party software required with API-M 3.2.0, see Installation Prerequisites. For more information on the products in each Carbon platform release, see the Release Matrix.

Fixed issues

Known issues

What has changed

  • Out-of-the-box support for Third Party Key Managers was introduced from 3.2.0 onwards API-M 3.2 is prepacked with an inbuilt resident Key Manager and has the inbuilt capability of configuring WSO2 Identity Server (WSO2 IS) as a third-party Key Manager using WSO2 IS Connector. API-M is capable of supporting other authorization servers like Keycloak, Okta, Auth0, PingFederate as a Key Manager.

  • API Key Validation calls which were sent over the network will now be made against an in-memory store.

  • From 3.2.0 onwards, backend JWT generation happens at the gateway. If you have implemented a custom JWT generator extending the AbstractJWTGenerator, then that custom jar should be added to Gateway Node not the Key Manager Node.

  • From 3.2.0 onwards, previous Jaggery based Admin portal UI is replaced with a new ReactJS based application.

  • Prior to 3.2.0, for simple approval and rejection tasks, having a separate BPS engine was mandatory. From API-M 3.2.0 this overhead is removed by introducing an Approval Workflow Executor with an inbuilt workflow to perform simple approvals and rejections without the BPS engine.

  • Support for tag-wise grouping is removed in API-M 3.2.0 and the users are recommended to use API category based grouping instead.

  • From API-M 3.2.0 onwards, support for implicit grant type has been removed.

  • Out-of-the-box support to generate an Opaque (Reference) access token via the Developer Portal has been removed from WSO2 API Manager version 3.2.0 onwards. Hence, now the Application Developers can create new applications that only generate JWT type access tokens.

What will happen to migrated applications?

However, the applications that are migrated from older versions would still have the support to generate Opaque (Reference) access tokens.

Similar to previous versions, application developers get the OAuth2 bearer tokens, while generating tokens via the Developer Portal. The only difference is the format of the token as the JWT type token is self-contained.

Opaque (Reference) tokens have become obsolete. All major IDPs have stopped or are in the process of retiring the support for Opaque (Reference) tokens. These tokens only work on systems where the resource server has access to or is co-located with the authorization server. As more and more systems become distributed and hybrid in nature, the use of reference tokens will eventually cease and also the organizations have full control of what information they include in the JWT.

Additionally, the use of JWT tokens decouples the Gateway component completely from the Key Manager component allowing for more freedom for innovation.

When migrating from previous versions of WSO2 API Manager, if you are still willing to continue the use of Opaque (Reference) tokens, you will need to maintain a Gateway to Key Manager mapping where when the Gateways are scaled, the Key Manager should also be scaled.

The profiles supported in WSO2 API Manager 4.0.0 onwards for a distributed setup are only the Gateway Profile, Control Plane Profile, and the Traffic Manager Profile where the Key Manager component is embedded within the Control Plane. However, if your requirement is to continue using Opaque (Reference) tokens, you will need to maintain a separate Key Manager node or a Cluster to be able to scale it with the Gateway nodes. For instructions on how to configure a separate Key Manager profile along with the Control Plane, Gateway and Traffic Manager profiles, see Deploying WSO2 API Manager in a Distributed Setup with Key Manager Separated.

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