Why Cloud APIs on GCP is Awesome by leveraging Apigee?
Hallo cloud community friends, what’s up there. Last week had a chance to attend the API Jam workshop by GCP Apigee team at Stockholm, which was thumbs up workshop. Am novice to API’s but by end of the one-day Jam workshop got grip on API Design, API Development API Security, API Analytics, API Diagnostics, API Publishing, Traffic Management, and Hybrid Deployment by leveraging Apigee Edge platform. The lunch and breakfast are mind-blowing, especially the energy balls during fika is excellent.
This week let’s have conversation on the question “Why Cloud APIs on GCP is Awesome by leveraging Apigee?”.
Let’s start defining API by a business perspective, API is a set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications which access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service, which could be delivered on on-premise, datacenter, cloud, or hybrid. In other words how, we use the user interfaces (UI) to interact with an application, in a similar way API allows applications to interact with other applications. Now we understood the what is API, next let’s get grip on the OAI. Is OAI and API are same, no they are not. The OpenAPI Initiative was created by a consortium of forward looking industry experts who recognize the huge value of standardizing on how REST APIs are described. Linux Foundation is leading this initiative, which is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. SmartBear donated the Swagger specification to the OAI, and OAI leverage this to have open specification. APIs drive the connected applications world, and you know nearly every application uses APIs to connect with corporate data sources, 3rd party data services, and the other applications. API is back bone to the truly connected world.
In this connected world below diagram depicts how API helps to have Systems of Engagement from Systems of Record to have millions of interactions between the applications in days.
Next is API replaces the Microservices, nope the APIs and Microservices are complementary. It brings the outside-in view (digital consumer view) instead of Inside-out view (service provider view) in the digital value chain.
Google Cloud APIs are a key part of Google Cloud Platform, allowing us to easily add the power of everything from storage access to machine-learning-based image analysis to our Cloud Platform applications. We can access Cloud APIs from server applications with our client libraries in a wide variety of popular programming languages, from mobile apps via the Firebase SDKs, or by using third-party clients. We can also access the same services via our SDK command line tools or our Google Cloud Platform Console web UI. All our Cloud APIs expose a simple JSON REST interface that we can call directly or via our client libraries. Some of our latest generation of APIs also provide an RPC interface that lets clients make calls to the API using gRPC, many of our client libraries use this to provide even better performance when we use these APIs. Apigee Edge is a platform for developing and managing API proxies. Think of a proxy as an abstraction layer that “fronts” for your backend service APIs and provides value-added features like security, rate limiting, quotas, analytics, and more. The primary consumers of Edge API proxies are app developers who want to use our backend services.
The following table lists all currently available Cloud APIs in Google Cloud Platform like Compute, Storage, Database, Networking, Big Data, Machine Learning, Management Tools, Identity, Security, Infra APIs.
| COMPUTE APIs | |
| App Engine Admin API | Provisions and manages App Engine applications. |
| Cloud User Account API | Creates and manages users and groups for accessing Google Compute Engine virtual machines. |
| Compute Engine API | Creates and runs virtual machines on Google Cloud Platform. |
| Kubernetes Engine API | Builds and manages clusters that run container-based applications, powered by open source Kubernetes technology. |
| Compute Engine Instance Group Updater API | Updates groups of Compute Engine instances. |
| STORAGE & DATABASE APIs | |
| Cloud Bigtable Admin API | Manages our Cloud Bigtable instances, clusters, and tables. |
| Cloud Bigtable Data API | Accesses the NoSQL, Big Data solution for storing terabytes or petabytes of schemaless data. |
| Cloud Datastore API | Accesses the schemaless NoSQL document database to provide fully managed, robust, scalable storage for our application. |
| Cloud SQL Administration API | Creates and configures Cloud SQL instances, which provide fully-managed MySQL databases. |
| Cloud Storage JSON API | Stores and retrieves potentially large, immutable data objects. |
| Storage Transfer API | Transfers data from external data sources to a Google Cloud Storage bucket or between Google Cloud Storage buckets. |
| NETWORKING APIs | |
| Cloud DNS API | Configures and serves authoritative DNS records. |
| BIG DATA APIs | |
| BigQuery API | Creates, manages, shares and queries data. |
| Cloud Dataflow API | Develops and executes data processing patterns like ETL, batch computation, and continuous computation. |
| Cloud Dataproc API | Manages Hadoop-based clusters and jobs on Google Cloud Platform. |
| Genomics API | Stores, processes, explores and shares genomic data. |
| Cloud Pub/Sub API | Provides reliable, many-to-many, asynchronous messaging between applications. |
| MACHINE LEARNING APIs | |
| Cloud Vision API | Integrates Google Vision features, including image labeling, face, logo, and landmark detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and detection of explicit content, into applications. |
| Cloud Speech API | Uses fast and accurate speech recognition to convert audio, either from a microphone or from a file, to text in over 80 languages and variants |
| Natural Language API | Analyzes the structure and meaning of text, including sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and text annotations. |
| Translation API | Translates text from one language to another. |
| MANAGEMENT TOOL APIs | |
| Cloud Billing API | Retrieves Google Developers Console billing accounts and associates them with projects. |
| Container Builder API | Builds container images in the cloud. |
| Stackdriver Debugger API | Examines the call stack and variables of a running application without stopping or slowing it down. |
| Stackdriver Error Reporting API | Groups and counts errors from Cloud services, provides read access to error groups and their associated errors. |
| Stackdriver Trace API | Sends and retrieves trace data from Stackdriver Trace. Data is generated and available by default for all App Engine applications. Data from other applications can be written to Stackdriver Trace for display, reporting, and analysis. |
| Deployment Manager API | Declares, configures, and deploys complex solutions on Google Cloud Platform. |
| Stackdriver Logging API | Writes log entries and manages our logs, log exports, and logs-based metrics. |
| Stackdriver Monitoring API | Manages our Stackdriver Monitoring data and configurations. |
| Cloud Runtime Config API | Provides capabilities for dynamic configuration and coordination for applications running on Google Cloud Platform. |
| IDENTITY & SECURITY APIs | |
| Resource Manager API | Provides methods for creating, reading, and updating project metadata. |
| Identity and Access Management API | Manages identity and access control for Google Cloud Platform resources, including the creation of service accounts, which we can use to authenticate to Google and make API calls. |
| MANAGED INFRASTRUCTURE APIS | |
| Service Management API | Provides methods for publishing managed services and managing service configurations. |
| Service Control API | Provides control plane functionality for managed services, including access control and integration with logging and monitoring services. |
| Service Consumer Management API | Provides utilities to help managed service producers manage their relationships with their services’ consumers, including the ability to create and manage tenancy units. |
Apigee Edge can be used to create spec by leveraging OpenAPI Spec. And the Apigee edge have three services like Management Services, Developer Services, and Analytics Service.
Apigee on Google Cloud Platform is a full lifecycle API platform that accelerates the pace of digital business and empowers organizations to securely deliver and manage all APIs. Apigee sits in-line with runtime API traffic and enforces a set of out-of-the-box API policies, including key validation, quota management, transformation, authorization, and access control. It manages the entire API lifecycle with capabilities that include Secure API Runtime, Developer Management, Analytics, API Development, and Operations Automation. API providers use the customizable developer portal to enable developers to consume APIs easily and securely, and to measure API performance and usage.
Apigee complements the GCP developer experience by providing a rock-solid API management solution. It has service plans like 30-day free trial, Apigee Edge Team, Apigee Edge Business, Apigee Edge Enterprise.
Hence the Cloud API on GCP is Awesome by leveraging Apigee. And are you interested to jumpstart on this API program, enjoy enrolling with API Virtual Jam workshop on Monday, Mar 5, 2018 9-11am PST.
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