APIs have become more and more popular in the last 10 years. The combination of business functions from different companies offers immense potential for innovation and new business models. Entire, cross-industry ecosystems are emerging. If you want to be part of these ecosystems, you have to open up your business and think about publishing APIs. They offer well-defined endpoints and provide access to business functions and objects. Going that way it’s important to introduce additional capabilities in order to manage and secure your APIs. API management is becoming an important tool to keep control.On the other hand microservices are everywhere nowadays when building applications. Service meshes now come into play, another very interesting tool for managing networks of (micro)services. We take a look at the most important functions as well as the usage contexts and compare both approaches.