API products onboarding · cloudesire documentation

API calls reselling is available via Kong API Management Solution.

This section describes how to onboard and start selling an API-based product with metered billing based on the actual usage, i.e. HTTP calls executed.

The onboarding process starts after creating a new "Product" in the Marketplace Catalog, as described in the onboarding section.

For extended integration purposes, it's possible to define a syndication endpoint like in syndicated products to receive events about the creation and termination of the related subscriptions for a specific product.

Authentication

Secure access to the upstream API is managed by the platform, generating a unique token during the provisioning process for each consumer, that expires when the subscription is terminated.

For this reason, the API URL is never directly exposed to the consumer. Instead, an intermediate endpoint is automatically managed by the platform to let the consumer reach the API backend is a secure and controlled way.

When a consumer sends a request to the API, an additional set of HTTP headers is added to the request arriving at the API backend:

X-Consumer-ID: an auto-generated ID of the Consumer
X-Consumer-Username: the unique subscription id of the platform

Authentication header

To secure your upstream API, and avoid clients circumventing our rate-limited endpoint, you are encouraged to setup an authentication header while configuring an API product, and check that every request proxied by the platform contains such header with the correct secret.

Pricing models

In addition to the usual SaaS pricing models available on every plan, it's possible to define a prepaid or pay-per-use pricing model based on the consumer access count to an HTTP endpoint.

API endpoints definition

For every HTTP endpoint that needs to be billed, create a resource with:

name: a short name that describe the http endpoint
description: an extended description of what the HTTP endpoint will do
identifier: an unique, not-updatable identifier for this specific HTTP endpoint
method: the HTTP method of the endpoint (e.g. POST)
path: the HTTP path of the endpoint (e.g. /invoice)

Prepaid HTTP endpoints pricing (Rate limiter)

For every prepaid endpoint, a rate limiter is automatically configured accordingly to the defined pricing.

When rate limiter is enabled, some additional headers are automatically sent back to the client telling how many requests are available and what are the limits allowed, for example:

X-RateLimit-Limit-month: 1000
X-RateLimit-Remaining-month: 992

If any of the limits configured is being reached, an HTTP/1.1 429 status code will be returned to the client with the following JSON body:

{"message":"API rate limit exceeded"}

Pay-per-use HTTP endpoints pricing

For every pay-per-use endpoint, request counters are automatically defined and tracked by the platform.

At the end of the billing period, the customer will receive an invoice for the requests made by the customer during the current period.