Apigee is one of the acquisitions of Google that signals its intent of attracting customers with high-quality digital interactions. In recent years, as micro services are steadily gaining traction, ISVs (independent software vendors) are looking to empower development team’s focus to build and deliver the API products faster. In order to achieve these goals, the enterprises would be required to do the heavy lifting themselves and work on an API platform. To help the enterprise in aiding the goal of designing and implementing, increasing the productivity of the developer, innovate faster, adapt to market needs, and improve efficiency in an API era, Apigee is the pivotal solution. Apigee is an API management platform that enhances the digital offering of ISVs.
Apigee is an API management platform– a tool that facilitates the interaction of customer requests to the online backend services. It ensures that the customer is protected against a DOS (denial of service) attack when a user is sending too many requests intentionally or unintentionally. The API Management platform includes capabilities like monitoring and analytics management, API key and authorization management, documentation of APIs, and developer management and support for API monetization.
Apigee is an API management platform – a tool that facilitates the interaction of customer requests to the online backend services.
Apigee is a cross-cloud API management platform. It allows deployment in the cloud as Apigee Edge (SaaS solution), Edge for private cloud (on premises), and Apigee hybrid. It is a tool or process of steps for developing and managing APIs. It protects the target service by fronting with a proxy layer and acts as an abstraction for your backend service APIs. API providers use the self-service developer portal to enable developers to consume APIs usage easily and securely.
“Apigee was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management for four consecutive times and also positioned highest in the ability to execute.”
By- Gartner
Apigee – Features
Image Source: -(Apigee Doc)https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/apigee/tue-1700-learn-08-apigee-edge-o...
Use-case (Automated CI/CD Pipeline for Apigee Deployment with GCP) - Features
- Policy Management: - A policy is a unit of work that is responsible for implementing a required function as part of a request/response flow between a source and a target. Policies provide features such as security, traffic-management, throttling, caching, and mediation capabilities, etc.
- Extensions Integration: - Extensions are used to integrate external or third-party resources into your API proxies. For example, Stackdriver Logging and Google Authentication, etc.
- DevOps Pipeline: - It is a software deployment life cycle where manual things are automated such as the development of policies, deployment to staged environments, and testing in the Apigee Edge Platform to increase the throughput and productivity of developers.
- Developer Portal: - The Developer Portal is a self-service dashboard for developers to interact as a community and discover, consume, build, and test APIs. App developers connect to the dev portal to access API documentation for available API products and manage API keys.
- Monitoring: - It refers to the monitoring of the APIs that results in better visibility of the APIs operations, performance, diagnose issues within APIs, and take corrective measures for business continuity. Monitoring provides the information on API traffic, error, and other metrics for an API.
Use-case Architecture
Fig.: - CI/CD Pipeline for Apigee Deployment with Google Cloud Platform
Use-case Approach
CI/CD is an acronym for continuous integration and continuous delivery. Continuous integration helps to continuously integrate code commits by the developer into a single shared version control repository whereas continuous delivery helps to take the code from the repository and continuously deliver or deploy the product in the specified environment without any manual intervention. It's a necessity for the modern world of business and benefits the organization in numerous ways.
Google Cloud Platform is a suite of public cloud platform services provided by Google. It offers services for computing, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT), as well as cloud management, security, and developer tools.
GCP Stack
- Cloud Source Repository is a private Git repository managed by Google Cloud platform. It maintains the source code in Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Cloud Build is a fully managed service of GCP to trigger a build on GCP infrastructure. It is useful for scenarios when deployment needs to be automated.
- KMS stands for key management service hosted on Google cloud. It lets the GCP user to manage the cryptographic keys for the cloud services.
- Cloud Identity and Access Management let a user implement security on GCP. It is used to provide specific roles to users for accessing GCP resources.
Apigee Bundle
- API Proxy appears to be a shield for the backend target services by defining endpoints like URL, an HTTP verb, body requirements, etc.
- API product is a bundle of API proxies containing the specific API's and makes available for developers to consume the API.
- A developer is the app developer responsible for creating the apps, bind to the API product, and manage the API key.
- Apps are the developer apps created by the developer to consume provider’s API and define API key authentication generated by Apigee for the developer.
Competitors
API management platform is a necessity for the enterprises to implement security in APIs. It ensures that the data is not provided to the person without authorization. The platform also manages a spike in traffic by protecting users from malicious attacks. Many enterprises are focusing on building API Management platforms to secure, scale, manage, and analyze the digital business.
Mulesoft Anypoint Platform, WSO2 API Manager, Azure API Management, IBM API Connect, CA API Management, Dell Boomi, Kong, Agama API, Red Hat 3scale API Management, and Oracle API Manager are some of the top competitors in API management platform.
Conclusion
HCLTech, being a premier partner, possesses capabilities in different areas of GCP offerings, in addition to API management platform. It helps ISV with automation so that they can devote more time in building products and features to improve their APIs, troubleshoot problems, and ultimately, improving the products with faster time to market and better user experience. Apigee, as an API management platform, extends the digital products hosted on any public cloud platform or on premise to attract more and more customers.
