Apigee: Pay as you go (PAYG)- A new way to take control of your money

Overview

For a long time, we have been thinking about API as a part of the product. Like everything APIs also got evolved to a stage where we can think of API itself as the product instead of being a part of the product. Like any other software developing and managing API is not an easy task. The complexity of managing API is rising rapidly, thus creating a new set of API management solutions.

Everyone like one-click out-of-the-box solutions, But since not every solution is made with the same focus points, some might be better depending on the use-case

Apigee is an API Management solution developed and managed by Google, so developers can focus more on the business side of the product rather than worrying about how they are going to manage the APIs

Till now apart from the evaluation, there was only one subscription model in which the customer has to pay a fixed price based on the requirements.

PAYG Model

The real benefit of the cloud is that we need to pay only for what we consume and we don’t have to pay it upfront. We get more granular control on how we need to spend more on and ramp up as our requirement increases.

Sticking with this philosophy, Apigee introduces the PAYG model for the customers, especially those who want to start small without compromising their performance. Apigee PAYG model doesn’t require any upfront commitment and it provides great flexibility and control of your costs.

What am I getting charged for?

There are mainly 3 components that decide how much you are getting charged.

• The number of Apigee gateway nodes in the Apigee organization
• The number of API requests processed by Apigee Analytics services
• The amount of network usage

In simple terms, we are charged for computing power, analytic insights and network.

Apigee gateway nodes are computing power that processes the API traffic ( both incoming and outgoing). Approximately a single unit/instance node can handle up to 300 transactions per second with a maximum latency of 100ms and several other factors. Since the nodes are horizontally scalable we can increase the number of nodes (replicas) for handling more traffic. Apigee is smart enough to scale automatically (up to 1,000 nodes) according to the traffic so we don’t have to lose sleep over it.

Understanding the pattern of requests, whether successful or not, Apigee Analytics provides insight by processing every request and preserving the analytics data for 3 months.

Analytics help you answer common questions, such as:

• How is my API traffic trending over time?
• Which API methods are most popular?
• Who are my top developers?
• When is API response time fastest? Slowest?
• Geographically, where do I see the most API traffic?
• How much revenue did your transactions generate?

You can control every aspect of your network in your environment. By default, the Apigee instance is only available inside the network. But you can expose the instance externally using a Load Balancer. Apigee instances are region bounded. Typically, you start with a single instance and add new instances as your organization expands into more regions.

References:

https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/reference/pay-as-you-go