Apigee: Beginners Guide to Apigee API Management

Since the global pandemic, companies of all sizes around the world have been rapidly transitioning to digital models. But what exactly does it entail to “go digital”? Businesses must undergo a digital transformation to improve their operations on a grand scale. Cloud computing entails more than just putting up some servers somewhere else or moving some data around. Learning to adapt to a radical shift in company practices is at the heart of digital transformation. Instead of strengthening resource-limited tactics, digital transformation focuses on establishing and embracing repeatable digital processes and assets to exploit new opportunities for growth at scale. In this article, we will discuss the Google Apigee gateway, edge, API, and pricing.

Google Apigee Overview

In 2016, Google bought the API management platform Apigee to simplify the process of managing APIs for customers.  Apigee helps businesses maintain a consistent API interface for the benefit of the apps and services that use them.  Apigee also facilitates the tracking of usage metrics and features testing tools.  It even allows you to establish a developer site that makes it easy to request access, identify available APIs, and even test them out.

Apigee functions by adding a proxy layer in front of your services.  This “API proxy” acts as a layer of abstraction between your backend service APIs and the rest of your application.  Apigee intercepts all calls to your backend APIs on your behalf.  The appropriate API is then notified of the request.  This is how you can safely update your APIs without affecting their performance.  Adding additional functionality, switching databases, or moving to a new region may all be done seamlessly.  

These API proxies also allow you to apply additional logic to your APIs in the form of policies.  No changes to your API code are required to implement or maintain these policies.  Authentication, data transformation, and conditional processing are all possible enhancements.  This shifts the emphasis away from administration and onto development by freeing up programmers’ time.

So far, I have described Apigee as though it were a monolithic offering.  Once you get into the documents, though, you’ll see that there are a few variations.

What Is Apigee?

Apigee is a Google-made API gateway management solution that facilitates information sharing between various cloud-based services and programs. API gateways facilitate the interoperability of various resources by facilitating the exchange of data and enhancing the efficiency of communication. Apigee is one solution that can manage the API gateway and facilitate the creation and release of cutting-edge, programmer-friendly mobile applications. 

Apigee is an API development and management platform that provides an interface for your core service by hiding its inner workings behind a proxy layer that handles things like authentication, rate limiting, quotas, and analytics.

Features of Apigee

Apigee, a comprehensive API management platform, boasts several key features that empower organizations to manage their APIs effectively.

• API Design and Modeling: Apigee facilitates the creation of well-designed APIs, providing tools to define API specifications and ensure consistency in data formats.
• Security: Robust security features include authentication, authorization, and encryption, safeguarding APIs and data against unauthorized access and potential threats.
• Traffic Management: Apigee allows organizations to control API traffic, ensuring optimal performance and preventing issues related to overloads or misuse.
• Analytics: Extensive analytics tools enable monitoring of API performance, usage patterns, and other key metrics. This data-driven approach aids in making informed decisions for optimizing APIs.
• Developer Collaboration: Apigee promotes collaboration by offering developer-friendly tools, documentation, and testing environments. This accelerates the API development cycle and enhances the developer experience.
• Monetization: For organizations looking to monetize their APIs, Apigee provides features to implement billing, pricing models, and usage tracking, allowing businesses to derive revenue from their API offerings.
• Gateway Services: Apigee functions as an API gateway, managing the flow of data between clients and servers and handling tasks like request/response transformations and protocol mediation.

In addition, these features collectively make Apigee a versatile and powerful tool for organizations aiming to efficiently design, deploy, and manage APIs in a secure and scalable manner.

Who Uses Apigee?

Organizations of all sizes, from startups to large corporations, use Apigee extensively across numerous industries. In the technology sector, companies such as Google, which acquired Apigee in 2016, leverage it to enhance their API management capabilities. Beyond that, Apigee finds application in sectors like finance, healthcare, retail, and more.

• Financial Institutions: Banks and financial service providers use Apigee to securely manage and expose APIs for services such as mobile banking, payment processing, and financial data integration.
• Healthcare: Healthcare organizations utilize Apigee to enable interoperability among different healthcare systems, streamline data sharing, and improve patient care through enhanced digital solutions.
• Retail: Retailers leverage Apigee to create seamless connections between various systems, enabling e-commerce platforms, inventory management, and customer relationship management.
• Telecommunications: Telecom companies use Apigee to manage APIs for services like billing systems, network management, and customer support, fostering efficient communication within their infrastructure.
• Government: Government agencies adopt Apigee to facilitate data sharing, streamline citizen services, and enhance the efficiency of public sector operations.

In summary, Apigee caters to a diverse range of industries, empowering organizations to build, secure, and optimize their APIs, facilitating innovation, connectivity, and digital transformation.

What Is the Difference Between API and Apigee?

Apigee and an API (application programming interface) share common ideas in the world of software engineering and information exchange, but they have distinct functions.

API (Application Programming Interface): An API is a collection of rules and protocols that allows one software application to interact with another. It specifies the protocols and data formats that software components should utilize to communicate with one another. APIs provide for the connection of disparate systems, facilitating communication and data sharing between them. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the link between disparate programs that provide effortless two-way communication.

However, Apigee is not an API replacement but rather an API management platform. It provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to develop, launch, secure, and manage APIs throughout their lifecycle. Apigee is a middleware platform that facilitates communication between API developers and API consumers. There are tools for developer collaboration, API analytics, traffic control, and security, among other features. Apigee makes it easier to build high-quality APIs by covering bases like security, monitoring, and analytics.

API stands for application programming interface; Apigee is a platform that offers a set of tools to manage and optimize the complete API lifecycle, providing functionality beyond that of a standard API. Apigee streamlines the creation, distribution, and protection of APIs, increasing their effectiveness and accessibility.

What Are the Benefits of Apigee?

Here are some of the top benefits of Apigee:

#1. Easier-to-Use API Creation

Apigee promotes an API-first mentality and encourages developer cooperation while also making it simple for product creators to make API products. User developers may quickly sign up, generate API keys, and submit requests to consume API products, all of which encourage efficient reuse through shared flows. This method reduces administrative overhead, increases creativity, and shortens product development cycles. 

By integrating Apigee with AT&T’s API platform, we were able to drastically reduce the time it takes for developers to get up and running from months to days. This allowed us to quickly launch strong mobile applications and achieve productivity savings of up to 25% through effective code reuse.

#2. Protection of Managed APIs

Businesses should be wary of using unmanaged APIs due to the potential for abuse and harm to the company. To ensure the long-term health of your digital ecosystem, it is essential to secure these APIs and the programs that utilize them. Apigee has native support for all industry-standard authentication techniques. An example in point is how Apigee is supporting businesses that need connected digital experiences for end-consumers, and Apigee’s management proficiency handles the array of APIs, ensuring a smooth digital experience.

Also, Apigee’s developer site ensures the secure distribution of APIs in a way that benefits customers, partners, and staff alike. handling large-scale client payment accounts securely and effectively powers global payments and foreign exchange (FX).

#3. Creating Integrated Customer Journeys 

Businesses demand integrated digital experiences for end-consumers, and Apigee’s management proficiency handles the multitude of APIs, delivering a smooth digital experience. With the help of the developer portal, Apigee is able to release the potential of connected services for their customers, partners, and workers. 

To better serve its customers, Kao AEMEA (Kao), a global manufacturer and distributor, uses Apigee’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide immediate feedback on orders placed through different channels, proactively address issues such as short shipments or delays, and boost customer satisfaction through inventory adjustments made in real-time.

#4. Multi-Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud Environments

Apigee facilitates your APIs’ ability to securely manage large numbers of devices, organize a diverse community of developers, and include emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) in settings as varied as the cloud, SaaS, and on-premises servers.

Apigee Pricing

Google Apigee now has four different pricing tiers:

#1. Evaluation

Companies can experiment with Apigee’s robust features in their own sandbox. Free users can make up to 100,000 API requests per month, manage two separate environments, and view analytics data going back 30 days with this package. The evaluation plan is valid for 60 days and users cannot migrate to paying services from this plan.

#2. Standard

Companies that are just getting started with Google Apigee but want access to some of the platform’s most important tools should consider this plan. One company can use it in up to five different contexts, and each can make 180 million API calls each year. The Standard subscription guarantees a 99% uptime and supplies analytics data for the previous 30 days. This does not include Anthos. 

In addition, customers can acquire up to 14 months of analytics reports and monetization tools as add-ons in all the plans except Evaluation.

#3. Enterprise

In order to construct and expand enterprise-wide API initiatives, the Enterprise plan is available to larger businesses. This plan is good for 2 businesses and 10 environments, and it provides 1.2 billion API calls each year and three months of analytics data. Furthermore, this plan also features support for hybrid deployment, which expands customers’ entitlements to 25 organizations (up to 85 environments per organization) and offers 300 vCPUs of Anthos.

#4. Enterprise Plus

With 6 organizations and 30 environments and 10 times the annual call volume of the Enterprise plan, the Enterprise Plus plan is tailor-made for major businesses looking to function as a digital business platform and foster an ecosystem of partners and developers. This package includes analytics reports for 14 months. Over and above what an enterprise plan provides, its hybrid entitlements include 800 Anthos vCPUs.

Unless you’re interested in the evaluation plan’s 60-day free trial, you’ll need to get in touch with their sales team to discuss your specific needs and get an accurate quote.

What Database Does Apigee Use?

Apigee itself does not directly use a specific database in the way traditional applications might. Instead, Apigee is designed to manage and facilitate the communication between different systems and applications through APIs. It acts as an intermediary layer, providing API management services, analytics, security, and more.

However, behind the scenes, Apigee may interact with databases that are part of the infrastructure where APIs are deployed. The choice of the database depends on the organization’s preferences and requirements. Common databases that organizations use in conjunction with Apigee include relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, or cloud-based solutions such as Google Cloud’s Firestore or MongoDB.

In summary, Apigee itself doesn’t have a specific database that it uses, but it can integrate with various databases based on the needs and infrastructure of the organization implementing Apigee for API management.

Apigee Gateway

The Apigee Gateway is a central component of the Apigee API management platform, serving as the entry point for API traffic. Here are key aspects of the Apigee Gateway:

• Request Routing: The gateway directs incoming API requests to the appropriate backend services, ensuring efficient communication between clients and servers.
• Security Enforcement: It plays a vital role in enforcing security measures such as authentication, authorization, and data encryption, safeguarding the API infrastructure against unauthorized access and potential threats.
• Traffic Management: Apigee Gateway manages the flow of API traffic, implementing policies for rate limiting, quota management, and load balancing to optimize performance and prevent service overloads.
• Protocol Transformation: It can mediate between different communication protocols, translating requests and responses to facilitate seamless interaction between clients and backend services.
• Policy Application: The gateway enforces various policies like caching, logging, and error handling, contributing to reliability, scalability, and overall API performance.

In essence, the Apigee Gateway plays a pivotal role in ensuring the secure, controlled, and efficient flow of data between API consumers and providers within the Apigee API management ecosystem.

Apigee Edge

In 2004, in Santa Clara, California, a tool for managing API portals was discovered under the name Sonos System; in 2010, the name was changed to Apigee. Apigee is an API management and development platform that Google purchased in 2016. APIs allow for the interconnection of numerous services in order to supply data feeds.  The Apigee Edge will enable extraction for backend service APIs, and its functions are price constraints, quotas, security, metrics, and other API capabilities.

Apigee Edge offers a secure channel to reach backend services that have a clearly defined application programming interface. This API is designed to be completely independent of any application or data or backend modifications. When an app developer or program uses an API, they are actually using a proxy that was developed at the network’s edge. The API intermediary performs the planning of the HTTP endpoint for the backend administration. All authentication and permission for the service’s backend will be handled at the edge.

Apigee Edge Features

• Apigee Edge is a convenient portal that provides the user with a facility to design, publish, analyze, secure, check, and monetize the APIs.
• The updates and fixes arise quickly.
• API versions are supported at various levels.
• It offers analytics capabilities like dashboards, GeoMaps custom reports, etc.
• The Apigee Edge supports multiple languages like JavaScript, Java, Python, and Node.js for API management.
• It allows configurable policies like API essential verification, Access control, OAuth, JWT, etc.
• It is a cross-functional portal for both the cloud and on-premises.

Elements of Apigee Edge

Here are the elements of Apigee Edge:

#1.  Edge Monitoring and Analytic

Apigee Edge provides the full set of tools you need to gather and analyze usage statistics for your APIs. Multiple sorts of information are collected, including URL, userID, and; IP when the information is provided over Edge, without influencing the API constraints, the user may easily adjust this to capture the data such as query parameters, a part of feedback, and headers. Details like errors, latency, etc., can be gleaned from this information. However, this data is displayed via a web-based admin interface.

#2. Make Developer Edge Ecosystem

Developers will have access to the edge ecosystem’s infrastructure, which includes things like SmartDOCs, individualized portals, and self-service. The user’s interactions with both internal and external developers can be streamlined. The service’s user base will exert influence over the service’s app developers. A designer portal can be hosted in the cloud or on-premises for the convenience of the edge user. Application developers can link to the platforms to receive API documentation. There will be two types of portals built by edge clients:

• Drupal-based Portal: a completely customizable portal
• Integrated Portal: fast and convenient portals for the developer

#3.  Edge API Runtime

In this phase, the PIS is created and used, and features such as the API Gateway, features, connectors, security, federated runtime, and API first are implemented. The user can create an API proxy, deploy API products, and administer API-based programs for both developers and end users. It identifies the most pressing issues in API administration. In addition, using user-written scripts, the API proxy’s behavior can be altered to suit specific needs.

What Is the Alternative to Apigee?

When it comes to API management tools, Apigee Edge isn’t your only choice. Think about what else is out there and how you could make it work. When looking for a replacement for Apigee Edge, the software’s user interface and features are also crucial things to think about. We have collected a list of solutions, such as MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Kong API Gateway, IBM API Connect, and Amazon API Gateway, that reviewers voted as the best overall alternatives and competitors to Apigee Edge.

#1. Postman 

Postman is an extensible and collaborative platform for building APIs. It’s highly accessible and users merely need to log in to their accounts to access files remotely. Because API calls may be grouped into collections, managing test suites is simplified. Requests and subfolders are not limited to one per collection. The platform makes it simple to generate machine-readable API documentation and to make GraphQL, SOAP, and REST requests.

Postman facilitates the mechanization of manual testing, and the tool fits readily into the CI/CD pipeline to safeguard against API failures brought on by alterations to the code. As an API testing tool, Postman allows customers to verify the performance and stay up-to-date on the health of their API. The ability to incorporate a wide range of parameters and settings is a major asset of the tool. As a result, there will be less need for test repetition and streamlined file sharing. Related: 11 BEST POSTMAN ALTERNATIVES FOR API TESTING 2023.

#2. Kong

If you’re looking to grow your business, add new revenue streams, and attract more customers, then look no further than Kong, an open-source API management platform. This program is ideal if you manage a large number of APIs and want constant assistance from a specialized team. The software is integrated into Nginx and offers robust proxying functionality. The tool has improved the API gateway with features that make it more flexible. The software plugin system is open and it is possible to develop your own custom plugins. You’ll have full say over the structure thanks to its extensive modification options. Also, read API CONNECT: Reviews, Pricing, Features, Pros, Cons & More.

#3. Stoplight

Stoplight is an OpenAPI document-based API design, documentation, mocking, and testing tool. OpenAPI (Swagger) management is made ten times quicker with the help of a visual and collaborative editor for developers. Without the need to write any code, businesses may implement REST APIs that adhere to industry standards. Prism-powered mock servers that are both integrated and hosted are another useful tool for developers. 

Also, hosted API documentation allows users to quickly and easily produce high-quality, fully-tailored, and interactive documentation for their APIs. In order to familiarize themselves with the User API, customers can use the test requests provided in the documentation. You may customize the documentation with themes, custom CSS, pages, domains, and versioning. Users can create web APIs with specialized testing based on API contracts using OpenAPI Testing. The OpenAPI Mocking functionality allows the routing of incoming requests to example answers.

#4. DreamFactory

DreamFactory is a comprehensive and one-of-a-kind API lifecycle management tool that automatically generates REST APIs that are fully documented, open-source, free, and scalable. Without having to worry about data, management can concentrate on planning effectively thanks to this platform’s ability to facilitate collaboration between front-end and back-end developers working with a variety of databases. This software expedites the development process and unifies various data so that a single application can control it by turning any database into a REST API platform.

DreamFactory’s integration with databases enables API automation for developers. You can use this enterprise-level platform in the cloud, or you can set it up on your own servers. SaaS integration, business automation, and consolidated data views are some of its prominent functions. Simply put, DreamFactory saves its customers money by automating the tedious task of creating an API and selling this service at a reasonable price. It’s crucial for preventing API vulnerabilities, decreasing expenses without lowering quality, and speeding up the development cycle.

#5. Cloud Elements 

Cloud Elements was an early API integration tool that helped users see APIs as a single data model. This is done in a way that prevents the use of weak, standalone nodes. Users gain monetary, scalability, and performance benefits by putting data at the center of a tailored application ecosystem. As a result of these features, Cloud Elements is an important resource for companies in the banking/fintech, IT, and digital enterprise sectors. 

Furthermore, the utility provides a library of over 200 pre-built connections to aid in user integration. Users can also create new pieces from scratch or improve existing ones with the help of a specialized piece builder. Connections to the endpoints of certain cloud applications can be established using elements. Normalized authentication, search, event-driven workflows, and unified error handling are some of the other helpful features provided. In addition, users can also benefit from the assistance of virtual data resources in managing data in predefined formats.

What Happened to Apigee?

Google acquired Apigee in a deal that was completed in 2016. The acquisition marked Google’s strategic move to strengthen its position in the cloud computing and enterprise services markets. With the integration of Apigee into Google Cloud, the platform became a key component of Google’s offerings for API management.

Following the acquisition, Apigee remained an independent business unit under Google Cloud, continuing to offer API management solutions to businesses. This move aimed to enhance Google Cloud’s capabilities for businesses in managing their digital interfaces and facilitating seamless communication between different software applications.

The acquisition highlighted the growing importance of APIs in modern software development and the broader digital ecosystem. Apigee’s technology became an integral part of Google Cloud’s suite of services, contributing to Google’s efforts to support businesses in their digital transformation journey through robust API management solutions.

Bottom Line

In conclusion, companies should put together a backend team to ensure their apps and services are easily accessible online and on mobile devices. Apigee Edge makes it easy to visually change API behavior and construct policies without having to write any code. Users may view API traffic in real-time to look for unexpected surges, and your data is protected from criminal intrusion. Additionally, it shortens the MTTD (minimum time to treat). Apigee Edge delivers an ongoing client experience to partners, customers, and application developers.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Reference

• cloud.google.com
• cloudacademy.com
• techtarget.com
• saasworthy.com