Questions/Answers
Question 1
Please briefly describe the initiative, what issue or challenge it aims to address and specify its objectives (300 words maximum)
APEX is a self-service API platform that acts as a centralised and secure API gateway for the government. Through APEX, users can easily publish, monitor, and discover APIs across government agencies securely. The increasing role of data driven decision making has increased the need for a centralised and secure data sharing platform for the government through APEX.
APEX can be thought of as a centralised data sharing platform within the government. It enables convenient and secure data sharing through the use of APIs which contain coded rules that manages who has access to the data and how data gets transferred. The central logging system of APEX provides an overview of all API call logs, this allows agencies to troubleshoot issues when necessary.
Other key features of APEX include its self-service model, provision of professional services, ability to support multi-tenanted Environments and modern RESTful and SOAP APIs. The various open-source codes under APEX as follows:
• Node.js API signature library
• Java API signature library
• Node.js HTTP Proxy Server for attaching Apex authentication headers
• Apex API signature validator
Question 2
Please explain how the initiative is linked to the selected category (100 words maximum)
In addition to secure data sharing, APEX’s API catalogue provides government agencies with a searchable library of government APIs. This promotes knowledge sharing within the government, while reducing digital silos and the duplication of efforts. The central administration dashboard of APEX serves as a monitoring tool for system health checks and provides analytics.
Question 3
a. Please specify which SDGs and target(s) the initiative supports and describe concretely how the initiative has contributed to their implementation (200 words maximum)
Goal 17: Partnerships for The Goals (17.4 and 17.17)
17.14 Enhance policy coherence for sustainable development.
In July 2021, GovTech published the API policy, standards and guidelines under IM8 to provide agencies a common and consistent set of standards as a reference to develop and maintain APIs. This was a coordinated effort across the policy and APEX teams.
17.17 Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships.
We have gained traction and success in encouraging the sharing of data via APIs across the whole of SG government, and this includes cross-government agency, cross-team sharing of data. This ecosystem has also enabled citizens to leverage on government digital services to perform their daily activities. For example, the recent launch of the Singapore’s Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA)’s Safe Travel Portal (https://safetravel.ica.gov.sg/) to facilitate the Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) between Singapore-Malaysia is a huge morale booster to citizens, permanent residents and long-term pass holders who could finally reunite with family members after the easing of a prolonged 20 months of border restrictions since March 2020. The VTL is intended to support up to 2,880 travellers a day, with 1,440 travellers in each direction.
b. Please describe what makes the initiative sustainable in social, economic and environmental terms (100 words maximum)
APEX runs on a cost-recovery model and recovers cost from Government agencies subscribing to the APEX services, in order to sustain the day-to-day operations of APEX. On-going platform system capacity planning and improvement works to optimise resources also helps to drive up cost savings. The scalable nature of the platform ensures that IT resources are catered only when needed, with the option to increase its capacity progressively depending on the usage level through virtualization technologies. This reduces the amount of overprovisioning of resources and thus, reducing the cost further.
Question 4
a. Please explain how the initiative has addressed a significant shortfall in governance, public administration or public service within the context of a given country or region. (200 words maximum)
Data is central to transformation of public service delivery. Insights from data can inform policy changes, enable data-driven decision making and facilitate the development of citizen-centric digital products and services.
The Singapore Government had long been without a common data sharing platform that provides modern functionalities to share data effectively. Data sharing was earlier done point-to-point directly from one Government agency to another which was both inefficient and costly to set up and maintain. Data interfaces were often difficult to configure due to the usage of different software protocols. Data sharing in this manner lacked transparency, making access control difficult to govern and manage.
To enable government agencies to use data more efficiently, a centralized platform is needed to help the government track and manage data from all sources. The APEX platform is set up for this purpose.
b. Please describe how your initiative addresses gender inequality in the country context. (100 words maximum)
NA
c. Please describe who the target group(s) were, and explain how the initiative improved outcomes for these target groups. (200 words maximum)
APEX has helped to improve the lives of citizens and businesses.
An example on the citizen front is the recent launch of the Singapore’s Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA)’s Safe Travel Portal (https://safetravel.ica.gov.sg/) to facilitate the Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) between Singapore-Malaysia. This is a huge morale booster to citizens, permanent residents and long-term pass holders who could finally reunite with family members after the easing of a prolonged 20 months of border restrictions since March 2020. The VTL is intended to support up to 2,880 travellers a day, with 1,440 travellers in each direction.
Another example whereby APEX has help businesses is the LicenceOne portal launched by Enterprise Singapore (ESG). LicenceOne is a one-stop portal that simplifies business licenses applications, payments of licenses related fees, and a central platform for businesses to update, renew and terminate licenses issued by various Government agencies.
Question 5
a. Please describe how the initiative was implemented including key developments and steps, monitoring and evaluation activities, and the chronology. (300 words)
APEX started off as a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) system in 2016 as a test bed for cross internet-intranet bridging API calls due to a policy to segregate internet and intranet access controls as mandated by the Singapore Government.
Following the feasibility and success of the POC, APEX was officially commissioned in 2017 as a production system, swiftly scaling up to an enterprise-level platform and become a critical system for the whole of government in 2018.
Chronology of key milestones:
2015 – Seed funding obtained to kick start POC work.
2016 – POC work commenced, this included the following activities:
- comparison and assessment of various API Gateway COTS products and narrowing down to one solution;
- building up the underlying on-premise infrastructure in data centre (including monitoring, logging);
- development work on the APEX portal to enable discovery of APIs published by API owners;
- metrics and health-check dashboard put in place.
2017 – Official launch of APEX with pilot users onboarded, monthly training provided to users.
2018 – APEX categorised as a critical platform for Whole-of-Government (WoG).
2019 – Transactions peaked at 350 million API calls per month.
2020 – User satisfaction peaked at 91%, highest across all the years
b. Please clearly explain the obstacles encountered and how they were overcome. (100 words)
APEX started off as a POC system but became successful quickly. This propels the adoption rate across Government agencies when it went into production. While this was a good problem to have, however the was insufficient time to beef up the system capacity fast enough to cater to the quick increasing transaction volume as procurement of additional hardware and software took time. More buffer was added to the system capacity, followed by constant capacity planning and sizing to optimise the platform resources.
Question 6
a. Please explain in what ways the initiative is innovative in the context of your country or region. (100 words maximum)
APEX is the first common API Gateway platform deployed for the whole of Government to enable Government agencies to share data. Prior to APEX, some agencies were sharing data point-to-point (e.g manually via file transfers) or building their own platform to do so.
b. Please describe, if relevant, how the initiative drew inspiration from successful initiatives in other regions, countries and localities. (100 words maximum)
NA
c. If emerging and frontier technologies were used, please state how those were integrated into the initiative and/or how the initiative embraced digital government. (100 words maximum)
APEX is built with a combination of COTS product and open source libraries to maximise the capabilities of a readily off-the-shelf API gateway software that comes with readily available features without having to reinvent the wheel, and at the same time enable the customisation of Government-specific requirements which cannot be provided by the COTS product.
Question 7
a. Has the initiative been transferred and/or adapted to other contexts (e.g. other cities, countries or regions) to your organization’s knowledge? If yes, please explain where and how. (200 words maximum)
No.
b. If not yet transferred/adapted to other contexts, please describe the potential for transferability. (200 words maximum)
There is plan in the pipeline to extend the API Marketplace/portal to a wider reach of audience i.e. beyond Government to enable easy discovery of APIs by businesses and the general public.
Question 8
a. What specific resources (i.e. financial, human or others) were used to implement the initiative? (100 words maximum)
Financials, headcount (in-house team of developers, and operations co-managed by vendors).
b. Please explain what makes the initiative sustainable over time, in financial and institutional terms. (100 words maximum)
APEX is a one-time investment for an API exchange infrastructure for the whole of Government. This means Government agencies can leverage on the same infrastructure for different projects. With APEX, publishing, upgrading and maintaining APIs become more cost effective for all government agencies because they can be done easily through the same platform. APEX runs on a cost-recovery model and recovers cost from Government agencies subscribing to the APEX services, in order to sustain the day-to-day operations of APEX.
Question 9
a. Was the initiative formally evaluated either internally or externally?
Yes
b. Please describe how it was evaluated and by whom? (100 words maximum)
The idea of building the APEX platform started with a team of in-house engineers working on another container-hosting platform. It was with the introduction of a new policy to segregate the internet and intranet accesses across the whole of Government that the team started looking into ways and solutions to enable the container-hosting platform to still be able to support the needs of Government agencies to deploy their applications and share data between the internet and intranet, without having to violate the new policy. A small team of about 3-5 staff was carved out of the original container-hosting team to look into a solution which could satisfy the internet-intranet bridging requirements. A comparison between different API gateways were then evaluated and a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) done to ascertain the feasibility of the tool selected.
c. Please describe the indicators and tools used (100 words maximum)
The idea of building the APEX platform started with a team of in-house engineers working on another container-hosting platform. It was with the introduction of a new policy to segregate the internet and intranet accesses across the whole of Government that the team started looking into ways and solutions to enable the container-hosting platform to still be able to support the needs of Government agencies to deploy their applications and share data between the internet and intranet, without having to violate the new policy. A small team of about 3-5 staff was carved out of the original container-hosting team to look into a solution which could satisfy the internet-intranet bridging requirements. A comparison between different API gateways were then evaluated and a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) done to ascertain the feasibility of the tool selected.
d. What were the main findings of the evaluation (e.g. adequacy of resources mobilized for the initiative, quality of implementation and challenges faced, main outcomes, sustainability of the initiative, impacts) and how this information is being used to inform the initiative’s implementation. (200 words maximum)
As the internet-intranet segregation policy was new and specific to the SG Government then, there was a lack of documentation and architecture design patterns to reference. The team of engineers had to work closely with the central solution architecture team and convinced them of the feasibility, applicability and security of the design. The initial POC developed was built on a smaller scale with limited system resources. Within a short span of a few months, the POC platform went into production, and with an initial uptick in adoption rate with only a handful of pilot agencies onboarded, the platform saw an exponential increase in the transaction volumes with many more agencies onboarded. With only a small team of engineers to support the platform and numerous users, there wasn’t sufficient resources to react quickly to size up the platform capacity. Since then automation scripts to monitor system resources utilisation were put in place as a follow-up on capacity planning and sizing as a preventive measure to manage voluminous transactions.
Question 10
Please describe how the initiative is inscribed in the relevant institutional landscape (for example, how it was situated with respect to relevant government agencies, and how the institutional relationships with those have been operating). (200 words maximum)
APEX is intended as a whole of Government platform which agencies are recommended to leverage on to share data between them. To aid agencies to achieve this intent, APEX provides a catalogue of APIs available for consumption and reusability. Agencies are encouraged to explore using data more creatively by combining data from different sources to provide new digital services. This leads to the creation of innovative digital services that cut across agencies.
Question 11
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development puts emphasis on collaboration, engagement, partnerships, and inclusion. Please describe which stakeholders were engaged in designing, implementing and evaluating the initiative and how this engagement took place. (200 words maximum)
APEX was jointly set up by a team of in-house engineers and the API Gateway COTS product principals. The architecture was also reviewed by a team in the GovTech central solutions architecture office, with an oversight by the central security team.
Question 12
Please describe the key lessons learned, and how your organization plans to improve the initiative. (200 words maximum)
During the initial setup of APEX in the POC phase, scalability was an issue as the nature of the setup is hosted on-premise in physical data centres. The introduction of the SG Government Commercial Cloud (GCC) has expedited the migration of agency projects to the cloud, to enable projects to scale faster and improve time-to-market delivery. APEX is also currently working on extending its footprint into the GCC to both to scale faster and to enable agencies to continue to leverage on APEX for data exchange.