The Oracle API Platform adopted an intelligent pricing model by basing costs on API call volumes and Logical gateway node groupings per hour. In our book about the API Platform (more here). We suggested that a good logical grouping would be to reflect the development, test, pre-production and production model. This makes it nice and easy to use gateway based routing to different environments without needing to change the API policy configuration as you promote your solution through environments.

We have also leveraged naming and Role/Group Based Access Controls to make it easy to operate the API Platform as a shared service, rather than each team having its own complete instance. In doing so the number of logical gateways needed is limited (I.e. not logical gateway divisions on per team models needed). Group management is very easy through the leveraging of Oracle’s Identity Cloud Service – which is free for managing users on the Oracle solutions, and also happens to a respected product in its own right.

Most organisations are not conducting development and testing 365 days a year, for 24 hours a day (yes in an ideal world prolonged soak and load tests would be run to help tease out cumulative issues such as memory leaks, but even then it isn’t perpetual). As a result, it would be ideal to not be using logical gateways for part of the day such as outside the typical development day, and weekends.

Whilst out of the out of hours traffic may drop to zero calls and we may even shutdown the gateway nodes, this alone doesn’t effectively reduce the number of logical gateways as the logical gateway aspect of the platform counts as soon as you create the logical group in the management portal. This in itself isn’t a problem as the API Platform drinks it’s own Champagne as the saying goes, and everything in the UI is actually available as a published REST endpoint. Something covered in the book, and in previous blog posts (for example Making Scripts Work with IDCS Deployed PaaS and Analytics and Stats for APIs). Rather than providing all the code, you can see pretty much all the calls necessary in the other utilities published.

Before defining the steps, there are a couple of things to consider. Firstly, the version of the API deployed to a specific logical gateway may not necessarily be the latest version (iteration) and when to delete the logical gateway this information is lost, so before deleting the logical gateway we should record this information to allow us to reinstate the logical gateway later.

As deleting logical gateways will remove the gateway from the system, when recreating the gateway we can use the same name, but the gateway is not guaranteed to get the same Id as before, as a result, we should when rebuilding always discover the Id from the name to be safe.

A logical gateway can not be deleted until all the physical nodes are reallocated, so we need to iterate through the nodes removing them. When it comes to reconnecting the nodes, this is a little more tricky as reconnecting the gateway appears to only be achievable with information known to the gateway node. Therefore the simplest thing is when bringing the node back online we take the information from the gateway-props.json file and run a script that determines whether the management tier knows about the node. If not then just re-run the create, start, join cycle., otherwise just run the start command.

As with the logical gateway, re-running the create, deploy, start cycle will result in the node having a new Id. This does mean that whilst the logical gateway name and even the node names will remain the same, the analytics data is likely to become unavailable, so you may wish to extract the analytics data. But then, for development and test, this data is unlikely to provide much long term value.

So based on this, our sequence for releasing the logical gateway needs to be…

1. Capture the deployed APIs and the iteration numbers,
2. Ideally shutdown the gateway node process itself,
3. Delete all the gateway nodes from the logical gateway,
4. Delete the logical gateway,

Recover would then be …

1. Construct the logical gateway,
2. Redeploy the APIs with the correct iteration numbers to the logical gateway using the recorded information- if no nodes are connected at this stage, the UI will provide a warning
3. As gateway nodes, come back online, determine if it is necessary to execute the create, start, join or just start

Of course, these processes can be all linked to scheduling such as a cron job and/or server startup and shutdown processes.