APIGEE – An Introduction to API Gateway

In this article I want to give brief introduction about APIGEE. Mainly APIGEE offers below functionalities out of the box as api gateway.

1. Protocol Transformation
   Transform from or to any protocol including SOAP, REST, XML binary, or custom
2. Traffic Management
   Flexible, distributed quota management, rate limiting, and spike arrest policies out-of-the-box
3. API Security
   Built-in support for address filtering, JSON and XML schema validation, and bot detection
4. Data Access & Security
   Two-way SSL/TLS, API key validation, OAuth1, OAuth2, SAML, CORS, encrypted store, and HIPAA and PCI compliance
5. API Products
   Create different tiers by packaging APIs with varying rate limits and pricing
6. API Analytics
   Fine-grained performance monitoring, including anomaly tracing and drill-down and usage metrics related to apps, developers, and APIs
7. API Monetization
   Flexible rate plans, international billing, and usage tracking
8. Global Policy Management
   Enforce consistent security and governance policies across all APIs
9. Developer Portal
   A customizable portal for API providers to manage developers, APIs, and API documentation and versioning

APIGEE sits between service consumers and backend services. As an API gateway, APIGEE takes care of common functionalities required for the APIs. Hence backend services can concentrate only on the core business logic. The below digram  depicts where exactly APIGEE fits.

Now we will see how the request and response goes through APIGEE. Every client request will go through proxy and target endpoints where we will attach APIGEE policies. Policy is nothing but a simple module which will provide common API functionality which we can configure using XML. In each flow APIGEE exposes lot of flow variables.

Below are list of policies available out of the box which you can attach to proxy and target flows.

If you want to experience APIGEE edge, follow below steps to create trail account.

1. Goto https://login.apigee.com/sign_up. Enter the required information to create account with APIGEE.
2. After activating APIGEE account, login to https://login.apigee.com/login access Apigee Edge management UI

Below are some of the reference materials to deep dive into APIGEE

• Apigee 4MV4D: Apigee Edge 4 Minute Videos for Developers
• Developing APIs with Google Cloud’s Apigee API Platform Specialization
• APIGEE Edge documentation https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/get-started/get-started
• Apigee Certification Program
• https://community.apigee.com/articles/56382/apigee-api-platform-learning-guide.html
• Follow APIGEE Community https://community.apigee.com/index.html

About Siva Prasad Rao Janapati

Siva Janapati is an Architect with experience in building Cloud Native Microservices architectures, Reactive Systems, Large scale distributed systems, and Serverless Systems. Siva has hands-on in architecture, design, and implementation of scalable systems using Cloud, Java, Go lang, Apache Kafka, Apache Solr, Spring, Spring Boot, Lightbend reactive tech stack, APIGEE edge & on-premise and other open-source, proprietary technologies. Expertise working with and building RESTful, GraphQL APIs. He has successfully delivered multiple applications in retail, telco, and financial services domains. He manages the GitHub(https://github.com/2013techsmarts) where he put the source code of his work related to his blog posts.