Kicking the tyres of 3scale API Management with the operator

4 min readFeb 17, 2023

This is a shameless plug as I work on this product. This is a quick startup guide for getting 3scale up and running quickly with the 3scale-operator. This is not a production configuration and doesn’t cover all configuration options.

Install with the 3scale-operator

First we create a project

oc new-project 3scale-test

In the Openshift Administrator view we can then use the Operatorhub to install the 3scale operator into the project

Once installed we can create an APIManager CR to create an instance of 3scale. To do this we need a wildCardDomain that is resolvable in Openshift. You can setup a custom domain or you can use the Openshift default application router which I will used. This can be got from your Openshift console route e.g.

console-openshift-console.apps.aucunnin.4mog.s1.devshift.org

You also need an s3 bucket setup. This bucket is used for storing CMS data for the customer web portal which I won’t be covering in this blog. So once you have the bucket setup you will need its buck id , region and AWS key and secret. We create a secret in the project namespace

kind: Secret
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: s3-credentials
  namespace: 3scale-test
data:
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: UkVQTEFDRV9NRQ==
  AWS_BUCKET: UkVQTEFDRV9NRQ==
  AWS_REGION: UkVQTEFDRV9NRQ==
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: UkVQTEFDRV9NRQ==
type: Opaque

the values are base64 encoded e.g.

echo UkVQTEFDRV9NRQ== | base64 -d
REPLACE_ME

Once the secret is created you can create the APIManager CR

apiVersion: apps.3scale.net/v1alpha1
kind: APIManager
metadata: 
  name: apimanager-sample
  namespace: 3scale-test
spec: 
  system: 
    fileStorage: 
      simpleStorageService: 
        configurationSecretRef: 
          name: s3-credentials
  wildcardDomain: apps.aucunnin.4mog.s1.devshift.org

Once the CR is created it should install 3scale. You can confirm the install is finished by checking the APIManager CR status , should look like the following.

# using https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/
oc get apimanager apimanager-sample -oyaml | yq '.status'
conditions:
  - lastTransitionTime: "2023-02-17T14:29:27Z"
    status: "True"
    type: Available
deployments:
  ready:
    - apicast-production
    - apicast-staging
    - backend-cron
    - backend-listener
    - backend-redis
    - backend-worker
    - system-app
    - system-memcache
    - system-mysql
    - system-redis
    - system-sidekiq
    - system-sphinx
    - zync
    - zync-database
    - zync-que

Login to 3scale

Once we reach this point we can play around with 3scale. We can use the 3scale-admin route or the master route to log in the credentials for these are in the system-seed secret. I will use the admin route .

Route

Password

Click on the route and login as admin with the copied password and go through the welcome wizard.

Add your own API

I am going to use a free API to demo this

curl -k https://catfact.ninja/fact  
{"fact":"Both humans and cats have identical regions in the brain responsible for emotion.","length":81}%

Create a Backend

From the dashboard click on Create Backend and fill out the form adding a valid api.

Create a Product

From the dashboard click on Create Productand fill out the form

Add Application Plan

From the Product screen select Application and Application Plan and fill out the form, you can add thing like price plans, trial periods etc.

Add an Application

From the Product screen select Application and Listing and then the Create Application button and fill out the form again

Link your Backend to your Product

From the dashboard click on the product you created earlier, Click on Integration\Configuration and add the backend to your product.

Promote to staging and production

From the products screen click on Integration\Configuration again and click on the button to promote to staging and production

You can check the staging url out with the curl command e.g.

curl "https://catfact-3scale-apicast-staging.apps.aucunnin.4mog.s1.devshift.org:443/?user_key=073a4f36364b635c156811dcc1728d32"
{"fact":"Phoenician cargo ships are thought to have brought the first domesticated cats to Europe in about 900 BC.","length":105}%

That it for kicking the tyres , there is a lot more you can add to your product such as analytics, metrics, policies, API docs\ActiveDocs. There are plenty of other features but I won’t go into them as I would just be covering what is already in the docs