What is Google Apigee API Management Platform?

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Google Apigee brings API management and integration under a single unified platform. It helps enterprise IT teams to scale their operations, accelerate developer velocity, and increase the speed to market by leveraging its cloud-native architecture principles. Apigee Hybrid offers enterprises the option and flexibility to host their APIs on-premises, on Google Cloud, or in a hybrid environment. You have full control over the runtime which enables you to position the gateways closer to your API traffic. In this way, you can make full use of your existing compliance, governance, and security infrastructure and take advantage of cloud capabilities such as developer portal, analytics, and monitoring.

Google released the latest update of its API management platform, Apigee X in 2021. It makes use of AI-powered monitoring to make sure your APIs are up and always running. API issues can be diagnosed in just a few clicks and their behavior can be predicted in real-time. To top it off, Apigee allows the creation and configuration of a wide range of API packages, reports, payment gateways, revenue models, and developer portal integrations for enterprises to monetize their APIs.

Features of Apigee

Let us look at some of the features and capabilities that Google offers via its Apigee API Management tool:

  1. Design APIs — Google Apigee allows you to create API proxies and configure or code API policies as steps in the API flow. You can easily customize API behavior using code and transform from or to any protocol.
  2. Secure APIs — Apigee helps enforce steady security best practices and governance policies across all your APIs. You can protect your data at rest against OWASP threats with encryption, SAML, 0Auth 2.0, and two-way TLS (Transport Layer Security).
  3. Publish APIs — You can easily furnish reference documentation, manage the audience for an API from your portal, and develop portal content and reusable access controls with the help of Apigee.
  4. Analyze APIs — Tracking applications and developers along with their associated revenues is such a simple task with Apigee. You can investigate your API traffic data, spikes in traffic, and trace live API calls with real-time insights.
  5. Monitor APIs — App developers, customers, and partners receive seamless experiences. Issues can be investigated in a hassle-free manner, thus reducing MTTD.
  6. Monetize APIs — With Google Apigee API Management, you can take a step ahead with your current business models. Apigee will help you with scaling API programs and creating new monetization opportunities.
  7. Developer Portal — DevPortal allows you to publish APIs to a customizable portal that allows developers to easily explore, test, get API keys, and innovate. Your firm gets the capability to speed up API adoption with offerings, rate limits, and pricing.

Benefits of Google’s API Management Platform?

Google Apigee API Management comes bundled with numerous benefits that include:

  • AI-powered automation to retrieve actionable insights from your API data. This is especially helpful in predicting API traffic patterns, detecting anomalies in real-time, and protecting APIs against harmful bot attacks.
  • Cloud Armor, IAM, and CMEK add multiple security layers to API security.
  • A worldwide cloud network of Google Apigee helps your enterprise expand the global reach of your API programs.

If you are already on your evaluation journey for the best API management platforms, you must have come across various fantastic tools and platforms. Some of the best in the industry include SAP Integration Suite, IBM API Connect, AWS CloudTrail, Azure API Apps, Workato, Google Apigee Edge, Apigee X, etc. This should be noted that Apigee X is the successor of Apigee Edge for Public Cloud. Google has discontinued Apigee Edge and its most recent version, Apigee X (and Apigee Hybrid) is available for customers. Most of the Apigee Edge APIs have got their equivalents in Apigee X with some improvements.

While Apigee Edge for Public Cloud is hosted on Apigee’s cloud and managed by Google, Apigee Edge for Private Cloud is both hosted and managed by the customer. Apigee X, the latest version of Apigee, is hosted on Google Cloud and is managed by Apigee, while its Hybrid counterpart is managed and hosted jointly. Apigee Hybrid is hosted on both Google Cloud and the customer’s private data center and is managed by both Apigee and the customer.

Pricing Model of Google Apigee API Management Platform

There are four plans currently on offer by Google Apigee:

Evaluation: Firms can try out the powerful capabilities of Apigee in their own sandbox environment. This is a free plan that offers up to 100,000 API calls per month, two environments, and 30 days of analytics reports. The Evaluation plan is valid for 60 days and customers cannot migrate to paid offerings from this plan.

Standard: This plan is for businesses that would like to make use of some of the vital features of Google Apigee to begin their journey. It allows 180 million API calls per year for a single organization and a maximum of 5 environments. The Standard plan has a 99% runtime SLA and provides 30 days of analytics reports. Anthos is not bundled with this. Customers can get up to 14 months of analytics reports and Monetization features as add-ons in all the plans except Evaluation.

Enterprise: Larger organizations can make use of the Enterprise plan to build and scale enterprise-wide API programs. Valid for 2 orgs and 10 environments, this plan offers an annual call volume of 1.2 billion API calls and up to 3 months of analytics reports. Furthermore, this plan also has support for hybrid deployment that increases customers’ entitlements to 25 Orgs (up to 85 environments per org) and offers 300 vCPUs of Anthos.

Enterprise Plus: 10X the annual call volume of Enterprise plan with 6 orgs and 30 environments, the Enterprise Plus plan is the perfect fit for large enterprises to operate as a digital business platform and create an ecosystem of partners and developers. 14 months of analytics reports come bundled with this plan. Its hybrid entitlements include 800 vCPUs of Anthos, above everything else an Enterprise plan has to offer.

Except for the Evaluation plan which offers a 60-days free trial, you will need to contact their sales department with your requirements for the exact pricing. This table by Google sums up the Apigee pricing models:

If you are looking to ramp up your digital transformation efforts, unifying your API management and integration platforms will be a good first step.

The article was first published by SID Global Solutions.