Title: Best Practices for Hosting Public APIs in Your SaaS Infrastructure

In the landscape of modern SaaS development, separating internal services from publicly accessible APIs has become an essential practice. If you’ve designed your application by decoupling the front-end from the backend, you might now be contemplating how best to expose your API to third-party developers.

When opening your API for external use, one common approach is to host a dedicated API endpoint that serves third-party consumers independently from your core internal services. For instance, instead of integrating third-party access into your existing internal APIs used by your web and mobile applications, you might establish a separate domain or subdomain such as api.example.com.

This dedicated endpoint environment can offer multiple advantages:

• Enhanced Security: Isolating external-facing APIs reduces the risk of unintended access or vulnerabilities affecting core internal systems.
• Management and Scalability: Separate endpoints allow for tailored rate limiting, analytics, and versioning specifically for third-party integrations.
• Clear Separation of Concerns: Maintaining distinct APIs simplifies the development, testing, and maintenance processes, making it easier to evolve each interface independently.

Ultimately, whether to deploy a separate API instance or endpoint depends on your application’s architecture, security requirements, and the scope of third-party integrations. Carefully consider these factors to ensure your SaaS platform remains robust, secure, and scalable as it opens up to external developers.