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API Management / Edge Computing

Apigee Offers New Service to Manage Internal APIs

Jul 30th, 2015 6:06am by
Featued image for: Apigee Offers New Service to Manage Internal APIs

API platform vendor Apigee has announced a new lightweight service for managing internal APIs, called “Apigee Edge Microgateway.”

Meant to complement its existing Apigee Edge product, which helps companies manage their external APIs, this new service is focused inside the enterprise, offering security, monitoring and analytics capabilities.

“What we’re seeing is that a lot of our customers want to use the same system that they’re using for managing APIs that they’re opening up to the outside world … Every type of API they’re managing, they want to do it all in one place,” explains Ed Anuff, Apigee, senior vice president of product strategy.

Yet they don’t want all their APIs to have to go through a centralized system.

“If I have a microservice in my European data center and someone is calling it from my German office, I can’t have that traffic routed through a centralized installation that might be in my Dallas data center for me to go and secure this service,” he said.

“But it’s also not effective for me to do a large deployment of a platform at every place I want to do this. With the microservice gateway, I can deploy it at any of these offices and I can still monitor and administer, and I can allow all this traffic to operate locally as necessary.”

Apigee Edge Microgateway provides customers with the simplicity and performance of lightweight, on-premises API management together with the scale and power of a cloud-hosted service, according to the company.

It’s a local gateway deployed next to your microservices inside a private network that can simplify deployment, reduce latency and improve API program performance.

It’s set up as a gateway in which microservices pass through. The gateway authenticates the access credentials, makes sure that the security token is being used, it keeps track of usage and monitors it for performance. You also get an audit trail of how often the service is used, along with other analytics.

“With service-oriented architecture, you often hear people say, ‘We have all these services, but we don’t know whether anybody’s using them, so we can never shut anything down because somebody might be using it.’ This gives you that data,” Anuff said.

It also communicates back to Apigee Edge periodically so you can see what’s happening with all your services.

Written in Node.js, it’s designed to be very lightweight. It can share a server with the API implementations it manages or run on a separate server. It also can run inside a Docker container, on OpenStack, CloudFoundry or cloud platforms such as RHEL, SUSE or CentOS.

Customers have been asking for a better way to manage internal APIs, Anuff said, and up to now it didn’t have a good answer for that. He said it’s been a problem everybody in the industry is talking about but not shipping a product for.

In the past, vendors probably would have tried to address this problem with an integration server or enterprise service bus, which is very heavyweight and not developer friendly, he said.

“Service-oriented architecture and enterprise service bus are part of the previous generation of enterprise architecture. They were centrally managed and administered. Now APIs are happening everywhere in a decentralized way,” he said.

“The enterprise still has to have a centralized management capability, but they have to have a decentralized way of hooking in to all these APIs. APIs have been democratized throughout every engineering team in the company.

“You used to be able to walk into a company and say, ‘I want to speak to the person who manages your APIs,’ and there really would be one person doing that. Now if you do that, you’ll get a funny look because there could be 10,000 people building with APIs. There could be hundreds of people managing these APIs. If you don’t have a way to hook in to every one of these APIs where they live in the organization, you can’t effectively manage them.”

Apigee Edge Microgateway is available today for select customers and will be widely available later this year. To request an invitation to participate in the Apigee Edge Microgateway early adopter program, click here.

Apigee’s platform, in addition to Apigee Edge, includes Apigee Insights, an advanced predictive analytics product; and Apigee Link, an API-first product for the Internet of Thing (IoT). The company went public on April 24.

3scale and Docker are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature image: “New York window” by Lostinawave is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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