Layer7 API Management

What do we follow in conventional programming is written below - 

1. Developed/Implemented a feature on our local machine.

2. Move the related code changes to the development server.

3. finally after approval we moved the code changes to the production server.

But what will happen in case of LAC? do we need to keep this in every environment for e.g. If a developer is using some APIs in his machine then should he needs to install the LAC in his machine too?  OR  in other words, do we have different LACs for development & production and we need to Export the new APIs/Changes from the development server to the production one which is consumed by our live web application?

This may be the case I am missing a very basic concept of LAC implementation i.e. can we have this case that we will have only one LAC instance used to create the APIs and then we will publish them to the API Gateway to make them consumable by live web application?

Thanks for the help in advance!

Ideally, I would recommend following the 'conventional programming' model that you described. There are many workflow reasons that caused that model to be developed and be put to use in so many environments. For example, if you only have one LAC server, how would you be able to develop and test changes to existing LAC APIs without affecting production? Another example is that you may have a version of the API that is being tested on the development/UAT server, but you need to start working on the next version of the API(adding features, etc). Without the developer having their own LAC environment, their work could affect the testing being done on the development/UAT server.

There is a 'Jetty' version of LAC that would likely be the ideal thing for your developers to use locally. It is included in the LAC download package on support.ca.com. For production you would want to deploy the WAR files. I would recommend using the WAR files and also publishing the APIs to the CA API Gateway for your development/UAT environment, as you want this to match the ultimate production environment as closely as possible.

These are just suggestions of the ideal way to develop and not all customers have the resources available to deploy and manage this type of infrastructure. At the very least I suggest you have two LAC environments. Doing development/testing on your production LAC server could potentially affect your production traffic.

As you mentioned in your reply "There is a 'Jetty' version of LAC that would likely be the ideal thing for your developers to use locally". Here are few questions about Jetty version of LAC - 

1. do we need to use the license for Jetty version of LAC? 
2. do we need a separate license for each server wherever we will use the LAC? (In case there are more than one developers OR different environments i.e. production and development environments).
   1. If yes, does CA provides different licenses for different environments (development/QA/Production)? OR it is on to the user how they want to use it, LAC does not enforce such kind of licensing?.

As you agreed with the conventional programming model and suggested t to use two LAC environments then,

1. how do we manage the deployment of APIs created in the development LAC server to the production?
2. Which are the best practices to maintain API versioning in LAC?