API Modernization using Apigee
According to a recent survey by IDC, in next decade 75% organizations will be completely digitally transformed. Those that do not do transform, will not survive.
Organizations have been using Legacy Apps, APIs & Services in order to expose their services & data to the outside world. APIs have been playing a defining role in creating new digital services, integrating the partners & customers and utilize the business data in more efficient manner.
Moving legacy Apps, APIs & Services to modern infrastructure & platforms means reduction in IT budgets, optimizing existing processes & resources in efficient manner.
In an enterprise, Digital Modernization can be divided into 3 categories :
- API Modernization : Transforming legacy APIs & Services into modern REST (OpenAPI Spec compliant) APIs with latest Security Standards for REST APIs such as OAuth 2.0, JWT / JWS etc.
- App Modernization : Break legacy monoliths into multiple granular services using Microservices architecture, containerize them & manage them in Kubernetes cluster to make them cloud ready.
- Infrastructure Modernization: Move On-Prem legacy workloads into Cloud, use hybrid / multi-cloud strategy to reduce IT operational & maintenance costs / overheads.
A complete Digital Modernization can be achieved using following 3 approaches :
API-First Facade approach (API Modernization)
Hybrid approach (API + App Modernization)
Comprehensive approach (API + App + Infrastructure Modernization)
In API-First Facade approach, enterprises can use Apigee API Management Layer as a facade for their existing legacy APIs, Services while they work on transforming their legacy APIs architecture & infrastructure. API Consumers can consume OpenAPI 2.0 / 3.0 compliant REST APIs through Apigee using the latest security standards such as OAuth 2.0 / JWT.
In Hybrid approach, alongwith Apigee API Management layer, enterprises can use Anthos for containerizing their Microservices using Kubernetes & GKE, also use Istio (Service Mesh) for Microservices Management which can be hosted in their existing On-Prem environment.
In Comprehensive approach, along-with Apigee & Anthos, enterprises can move their entire workloads into GCP. By doing this they can utilize complete Google Cloud Services ecosystem for reducing their Infrastructure budgets, Scaling, Security & availability.
API Modernization can be divided into 4 phases :
- API Program & API Strategy
The ingredients of a successful API Program in any enterprise comprise of various factors such as API Mindset, Leadership, Investment & strategy — There should be a vision for entire API Program from senior leadership, right amount of investments & business strategy in place.
There needs to be pre-defined metrics in place such as amount of additional revenue expected out of API Program, number of partners, additional revenue channels etc.
To execute the API Program, the right API Team needs to be in place. API Evangelist, API Product Managers, API Designers, API Developers & API Testers are the key resources for a successful API Team.
APIs getting designed & built needs to follow the REST API Design Best Practices & principles. They should be easy to be consumed by developers.
And finally, there needs to be light API Governance in place to mandate the enterprise wide Security standards, development & deployment practices, release cycles.
An API Strategy should be in place in order to expose which set of data & services to API consumers. i.e. external facing APIs, Process APIs or System APIs.
With Apigee Compass , any executive, program leader, and business or IT person can score their API-first transformation, benchmark their progress against other enterprises, and receive curated recommendations based on Apigee’s work with hundreds of customers worldwide — all packaged to help them in move their program forward.
2. API Management & API Governance
API Management is the engine of any API program, so choosing the right API Management Platform which caters to all the needs of an API Program should be the first priority for the enterprises.
API Management can be divided into 4 phases :
Create — API Design, Development, Mediation & Orchestration
Control — API Security, Traffic Management, API Deployments, Testing & Operations
Consume — API Publishing, API Consumption & API Monetization
Analyze — API Analytics, Monitoring & Alerting
Apigee is the complete API Management Platform which has all the required features out of the box available to implement all the phases of API life-cycle — Create, Control, Consume & Analyze.
Create :
Apigee supports creating API Designs in Open API Specification format and then import them as API Proxy into Apigee. API Proxy is a facade between API Consumer & API Providers which can apply various policies for the in-transit API traffic before & after invoking the backend endpoints.
Apigee provides many mediation policies such as JSON to XML, XML to JSON, XSLT with which Apigee can act as a mediation layer to transform SOAP / XML to JSON & vice-versa. With this, Apigee can support legacy backend formats while API consumers can get the response payload in OpenAPI Spec compliant REST standard formats.
Control :
Apigee supports standard Security protocols such as API Keys, Basic Auth, OAuth 2.0, JWT / JWS, SAML & LDAP. Apigee can be used for both authentication & authorization using it’s out-of-the-box policies.
Apigee also supports Traffic Management policies such as Quota, Spike Arrest, Concurrent Rate Limit for restricting spikes in traffic & to protect the backend systems from a sudden surge in the number of requests.
Apigee provides Management APIs for all operations such as Create / Update / Deploy / Undeploy API proxies. Also it provides support to update all Apigee configurations such as KVMs, Target Servers, Cache, API Products etc. through these Management APIs. These APIs can be used in the CI/CD pipeline for automated build & deployments to have complete control over Apigee operations & maintenance activities.
Consume :
API consumption is one of the most critical element in the API Management Lifecycle. A well designed API can lead to easier API consumption. Apigee provides Developer Portal for enabling API Consumers to browse through APIs, get access by registering the apps and then try out the mock APIs using sandbox.
Apigee provides API Monetization feature for monetizing the incoming API Traffic. It provides rate plans, billing, taxation features to enable enterprises start earning revenue through their API Programs.
Analyze :
Once the APIs are deployed into Production, operations team need to continuously monitor them, get regular alerts in case of any anomalies so that they can react to them without further impact. Apigee provides a powerful API Monitoring & Alerting feature with which the most granular level monitoring & alerting can be achieved. Since the API Monitoring is embedded in the Apigee Platform itself, you can get end to end tracing capability and drill down till policy level faults which typically won’t be possible for any other external Monitoring tool.
Apigee also provides a strong Analytics capability for business users in order to see how the APIs are getting consumed, by whom, during which time frame etc. With this insightful analytics, business leaders in the organizations can take the informed decision about their API Programs such as where there is less traction, add more efforts to bring in more API traffic for example.
3. Developer Engagement
A great API Developer portal needs to follow 3–3–3 rule :
It should not take more than 3 minutes for API Developers to find which API is right for them & try them out in sandbox.
It should not take more than 3 minutes to register, onboard & get access to those APIs
It should not take more than 3 minutes to integrate them those APIs into their apps & start consuming them.
To achieve above, the Developer portal needs to have well defined API Catalogs, easy to use Get Started guides, good API Documentation along-with capability to try out the APIs.
There should be a mechanism for easy on-boarding in order to get faster access to APIs.
And finally there needs to be a detailed Q&A mechanism in place along-with a provision for FAQs to establish a community led discussions between API Consumers & API Teams.
4. API Economy
In API Modernization, APIs needs to be treated as products instead of projects. API Product mindset needs to be embarked in order to take complete advantage of the booming API Economy.
There are 3 main pillars of the API Product mindset :
- Outside-in approach : Always design & create APIs which can be consumed easily by API Consumers.
- Time to market : Improve time to market of API Products by using MVPs (Minimum viable Products)
- Iterations : Have multiple iterations to improve API Products continuously.
Once the API Products are in place, they can be monetized using multiple billing models :
Free : Free access to public APIs with threshold in place. This is basically to advertise your API Program to bring-in more traction to the API Program.
Developer Pays : Charge developers for accessing APIs using multiple rate plans — Pay as you go, Freemium, Tiers & transaction fees.
Developer Gets paid : Revenue share based on the API Traffic
Indirect : B2B Partnership contracts, Content acquisition /syndication, Internal ROI
A complete API Management Platform such as Apigee can help any organizations to start with their API Modernization journey right from scratch. The very basis of API-Native Apigee platform is to help build robust API Programs which can lead to greater business revenues and achieve the business goals, KPIs set by the enterprises.
Apigee : https://cloud.google.com/apigee
Apigee Documentation : https://docs.apigee.com/
