Addressing your API use cases: Choosing between Apigee, API Gateway, and Cloud Endpoints
API adoption is exploding everywhere — in fact over 80% of web traffic is now API traffic (source). This is considering APIs enable easier and increasingly standardized wordage of services and data — and this tends to lead to merchantry growth. Many organizations still regard APIs as implementation detail, but this massive growth of APIs can be difficult to manage without a well-defined API strategy.
This is where API management comes in — making it easier to build APIs, secure every API call, managing your API traffic and productizing hair-trigger data assets. At Google Deject we have three solutions for your API use cases: Apigee API Management, API Gateway, and Deject Endpoints, and each has a unique sweet spot. So how do you segregate which Google Deject solution is towardly for your use case? Let’s start with some definitions:
Apigee
Apigee is Google Cloud’s API management product that enables organizations to build, manage, and secure APIs — for any use case, environment, or scale. Apigee lets you operate in any environment of your nomination (on-premises, in Google Cloud, or a hybrid environment) with enhanced scale, security and automation. Apigee includes wide enterprise capabilities including security features like bot and misconfigured API detection, tools to package and monetize digital resources as APIs, flexible runtime support, developer portals, governance policies, and more. Apigee offers two pricing models: Pay-as-you-go pricing to manage your own financing without any upfront commitment, and multiple subscription tiers to maintain predictable costs
When is it optimal?
While Apigee is designed for nearly any use case, it's expressly valuable for customers who have very upper API volumes, a need for upper reliability and enterprise-grade security, or who rely on APIs exposed to third parties or partners as part of their business.
Many organizations manage a upper and/or growing volume of APIs – often deployed wideness multi-cloud environments and distributed architectures. This is particularly worldwide in large organizations relying on APIs to modernize their legacy applications without slowing development. In these use cases, Apigee’s flexible deployment options, resulting governance, and robust tools for managing the full lifecycle of APIs are essential to managing the APIs unceasingly at scale.
Maintaining upper API uptime, performance and security in spite of unexpected traffic spikes or growing malicious attacks is moreover essential for many organizations. Often these are use cases where customer-facing applications rely on APIs to orchestrate large amounts of business-critical or sensitive transactions. Apigee’s comprehensive controls to monitor, secure, and unriddle API traffic enable organizations to maintain consumer trust and resulting performance.
Finally, many organizations leverage public APIs as a waterworks to create new revenue streams or interreact with external partners. Often these use cases focus on maximizing the value of digital resources by packaging them into API products and monetizing their adoption. In these use cases, Apigee’s multiple developer portal offerings, API productization and monetization capabilities streamline this process significantly.
Why do customers love it?
API products - Ability to productize APIs hands (e.g., developer portals) leads to new revenue streams and opportunities
Security & governance - Automated analytics, monitoring and governance help establish resulting standards without slowing lanugo the pace of innovation
Battle tested - Apigee is Google Cloud’s primary API Management platform. Google (Apigee) was recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTMfor Full Life Cycle API Management six times in a row1
Flexibility - Apigee can manage home grown or third-party APIs, REST or GraphQL, on premises, in Google Deject or a hybrid deployment
API Gateway
API Gateway is a fully managed service that enables developers to create, secure, and monitor APIs for services built on Google Cloud. Designed for serverless workloads, API Gateway makes it easy to manage APIs for Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and App Engine. API Gateway includes security features like hallmark and key validation as well as monitoring, logging, and tracing. With consumption-based pricing, it’s moreover easy to manage financing with API Gateway.
When is it optimal?
API Gateway is optimal for cloud-native use cases where the target backends are often limited to services deployed on Google Cloud, and where the developer audiences consuming the APIs don’t require a developer portal. Often these are for very specific API use cases to package serverless applications: Deject Functions, Deject Run, and App Engine. This is often expressly useful for digital-native organizations, small businesses, or for larger organizations that are towers new applications or testing a proof of concept. If you’re getting started with API-first driven minutiae and towers serverless backends, then using API Gateway is a unconfined way to get started.
Why do customers love it?
Easy to take an OAS v2 spec and simply import it for generation
Seamless API gateways for serverless apps at Google Cloud
Very inexpensive to get started
Cloud Endpoints
Cloud Endpoints is a gateway that enables developers to to configure, deploy and manage an ESPv2 proxy. Although Deject Endpoints includes vital functionality like user authentication, vital deject logging and monitoring, and API keys to validate API calls, it requires customers to manage every detail of the API operations. You can manage Deject Endpoints financing with consumption-based pricing.
When is it optimal?
Cloud Endpoints is most useful when you specifically want to host the gateway on your own runtime with private networking, but would like the same kind of tenancy plane features (analytics and hallmark enforcement) that you enjoy with API Gateway.
The most worldwide use specimen for Deject Endpoints today is with gRPC services, where a developer wants to locally host the gateway with their project. This can be useful if you’d like to run and test the Deject Endpoint on your own local machine during development.
So what should you choose?
First of all, if you’re once using one of these products and it meets your needs, alimony doing what you’re doing. If not, try using the visualization tree unelevated to consider key factors in the visualization process.
For most customers running ramified or high-scale applications, we suggest considering Apigee first considering it’s a full-featured product designed for API consumption wideness teams, partners, organizations, and plane ecosystems. You will never outgrow Apigee considering it’s both the most feature-rich and scalable, and moreover the most cost-effective API management option at upper scale. Apigee is where we are investing most heavily in developing new features and functionality — your API product dreams are most likely to come true with Apigee.
However, if you’re working on a project that leverages serverless products like Deject Run and you’re not sure if you need to manage third-party APIs, optimize for upper scale or establish resulting governance yet, API Gateway is a good nomination considering it’s a lightweight product designed for exposing APIs at the project level. You can get started slowly and If your organization or project scales up or expands to require new features, you can consider upgrading to Apigee.
Finally, if you’re running local tests, operating in your own private network, require greater tenancy over your gateway configurations and runtime operations at the forfeit of operational complexity, then Deject Endpoints may be a good nomination considering it’s designed specifically for these use cases.
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