relationship between wso2 micro integrator and api manager

Question

in wso2am we can use message mediations in incoming requests and responses to process messages for different purposes. After I read micro integrator documentation, I believe that I can do whatever micro integrator is doing with its mediation sequences by the help of API manager mediations and it's confusing me because I don't know what is relationship between API manager and micro integrator. Are they two independent products? or API manager 4 has micro integrator inside? I would really appreciate helping me with any of my questions.

Answer 1

APIM and MI both have mediation capabilities.

APIM has limited mediation capabilities compared to that of MI.

We use APIM (Gateway) to deploy light-weight mediations which are used in request/response transformations, processing etc. More complex mediations including service chaining, service orchestration, message stores/message processors, scheduled tasks, etc are kept with MI.

MI functions as an intermediate layer between the APIM gateway and backend server performing various complex mediation logics which cannot be performed by the APIM's mediation capability.

We expose rest apis from MI which are used as the backend endpoint in the APIM gateway through which we chain the request to the actual backend through the MI layer.

Consider an example of generating a response for an API request aggregating response from multiple backends. This can be achieved using the MI's complex mediation capabilities.

[1] https://medium.com/think-integration/wso2-micro-integrator-weds-wso2-api-manager-26d4349d750f

[2] https://ei.docs.wso2.com/en/7.2.0/micro-integrator/references/mediators/about-mediators/

[3] https://wso2.com/blogs/cloud/the-power-of-mediators-api-call-transformation-and-orchestration/