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Achieve Digital Excellence with Apigee
Aug 20, 2021
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APIs (Application Programming Interface) form the cornerstone of today’s digital ecosystems. They enable the creation of a connective network among a number of different services. As companies continue to invest into an API economy, a unified platform to manage these APIs becomes critical to the success of API programs. This is where Google Cloud’s Apigee API platform comes to the aid of enterprises. Apigee enables businesses to seamlessly connect data and applications with secure and manageable APIs across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Apigee is a cross-platform service for developing and managing API proxies. By creating a proxy layer for your actual APIs, Apigee provides security, rate limiting, quota, and analytics for delivering connected digital experiences.
While exposing the APIs to the public, you may face challenges like:
Apigee can perform these activities with minimal configuration. This drastically reduces the development effort required to make the APIs public ready.
A simple answer to this is: Right in front of your backend APIs. Let’s consider this scenario –
The backend APIs are deployed in Google Cloud, Azure and AWS with each cloud deployment having a Load Balancer in front. Apigee can be placed in front of the Load Balancers. Apigee is connected to the backend APIs over the public internet. To ensure authentication, Mutual TLS is enabled between Apigee and the Load Balancers.
In an alternate scenario –
Instead of a multi-cloud setup, you have the backend APIs deployed only in Google Cloud. In this case, connecting Apigee to the backend APIs over the public internet only adds latency. It is beneficial to have Apigee present in the VPC. For this, there are Apigee variants available that suit different requirements.
Apigee has four variants based upon the underlying Apigee runtime and the residing locations of the management plane.
In the previous scenario, Apigee Hybrid or Apigee X can be used instead of Apigee Edge. This allows Apigee to reside in the same network as your services, thus adding security and reducing latency.
Let’s understand the core features of Apigee to learn how Apigee helps in simplifying the application stack.
Apigee policies are pre-written code snippets that perform a specified task. These code snippets can be added anywhere in the request or the response flow by configuring the policy and without additional development.
The types of policies available in Apigee are:
API products are a mechanism to bundle APIs into a single product. A consumer chooses to access a certain set of APIs pertaining to a use-case. These APIs can be bundled into a single API Product, and a set of credentials can be generated to grant access to them.
Using Apigee’s Monetization feature, you can set up prepaid or postpaid rate plans for your API products. Apigee Monetization can completely take control of the transactions that occur per request, and can provide mechanisms to top-up as well as purchase new products.
Apigee has a robust monitoring and analytics dashboard. It also allows you to generate custom analytics metrics based upon certain request or response data. This can allow you to create dashboards for specific business use cases.
Apigee Sense is an AI powered error reporting system, which learns the normal traffic patterns and alerts you when an abnormal pattern is detected.
Apigee allows you to maintain a single management plane for all the APIs, providing businesses with a robust foundation for enterprise digital transformation. Apigee can act as the single point of entry regardless of the actual residing locations of the APIs. This makes it a crucial component of your application infrastructure. It improves performance and efficiency while extending more security and protection.
Get in touch with our digital engineering experts today to start building your business’ digital future.
