INTRO TO APIGEE

Apigee, which is now a part of Google, is a full lifecycle API platform that accelerates the pace of digital business and empowers organizations to securely deliver and manage all APIs.

Let’s start with a basic view of the API management platform in a scenario everyone can relate to in their everyday lives.

We use our smartphones constantly. We open apps, click around, and get responses. We may also do things like log into our banking app and make payments.

All of these pass information from the app to the API management platform that directs the request to the correct location in the company’s backend systems, to then send a response all the way back through the API management platform to your smartphone app.

The API management platform is central to digital strategy and is critical for companies looking to move at the speed of today’s innovation.

Hundreds of companies, including Walgreens, Burberry, First Data, Swisscom, and Live Nation — as well as tens of thousands of developers — use Apigee to simplify the delivery, management, and analysis of API.

APIGEE provides us three capability services:

1. APIGEE Edge
2. APIGEE Sense
3. APIGEE Monetization

1. APIGEE Edge:

It is a platform for developing and managing APIs. Simple.

It consists of three layers:

1. API Service Layer: It is the core area for creating, publishing, and managing your portfolio of API proxies, as well as implementing security access to protect your company’s assets.
2. Developer Service Layer: It includes areas that integrate with the API management platform to provide developers access and tools to consume APIs which is critical for developers to easily discover, build, and test applications.
3. Analytics Service Layer: It allows full visibility and details into the health of your program, with details on usage and performance.

2. APIGEE Sense:

It is an intelligent behavior detection and security product that protects APIs from attacks.

1. It protects your APIs from unwanted request traffic, including attacks from malicious clients;
2. It analyzes API request traffic, identifying patterns that might represent unwanted requests;
3. It works with Apigee Edge API management platform using algorithms built by analyzing metadata from billions of API calls on a regular basis;
4. It provides an additional layer of API security by identifying and alerting administrators to suspicious API behaviors, such as content scraping, credential stuffing, compromised keys or tokens, and much more.

3. APIGEE Monetization:

It is a flexible, easy to use solution to realize value from your APIs.

1. It offers end-to-end monetization capabilities;
2. It provides us the flexibility to create various revenue models, process payments, and manage building ;
3. It has robust reporting capabilities;
4. It has the ability to integrate with your developer portal to manage these plans.

TECHNOLOGY STACK USED WITHIN APIGEE:

Each service has a mixture of Apigee Stack and open source components that talk to each other, performing a specific function.

Within the three major capability services that APIGEE Edge provides, we have below common components:

1. Gateway: It mainly routes and processes the API
2. UI: for the enterprise admin
3. Developer portals: To subscribe to the product and access the APIs
4. Infrastructure services: It handles the persistence of runtime and analytics data
5. Management server: It provides APIs for all configurations and management activities.

Within API Services we have the following components:

1. Router: It handles all incoming API traffic and dispatches it to the message processor;

2. Message processor: It executes all the policies for a given specific organization and environment;

3. Management server: It provides APIs for all configurations and management tasks.

4. Enterprise UI: It offers an extended capability.

5. Cassandra: It stores application configurations, API keys, and the OAuth tokens.

6. Zookeeper: It contains service configuration data.

7. OpenLDAP: It contains the organization’s users and their rules.

Within Analytics Service:

1. Qpid server and the Qpid queuing system: It transports the analytics data.

2. Postgres server and the PostgreSQL database: It manages the analytics database.

Within Developer Services:

1. Developer portal: It is used to expose the API documentation.

2. MySQL database: It is used to register external developers and their apps.

Let’s talk about what happens when an API call is made and the request hits Apigee.

• The routers receive the request and send them to their message processors.
• The message processor will then execute the policies within the API proxy implementation and forward the request to the backend system.
• The message processor interacts with Cassandra for token validation and other policies.
• The message processor waits for the response from the backend system, processes it, and then sends it back to the client via the router.

Now let’s understand the analytics flow.

• The data is generated by the message processor and is asynchronously sent to the Qpid.
• Qpid server consumes the analytics raw data and writes it onto the PostgreSQL database.
• Postgres Server aggregates the data, writes it into the PostgreSQL master database, which can be used to query and generate different reports.

This was all a brief introduction about APIGEE and the different services it offers to us. Hope you liked this article.

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