Ultimate Guide to Apigee: Why You Need It More Than Ever

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

APIs (Application Programming Interface) are developers’ bread and butter, with nearly 90% using APIs* in their projects. API-oriented architecture is the foundation for digital transformation, becoming even more significant in the age of AI. Or as Google typically states: “there’s no AI without API”. When utilising APIs, an efficient platform is crucial for security, configuration, analysis, and management. In this article, you’ll learn the basics of Google’s Apigee – the API management platform that has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™. Explore all the functionalities and benefits that make Apigee so popular, and discover how you can succeed with it in the AI era.

I. What is Apigee?

Google’s Apigee is a cloud-native platform simplifying connections between SaaS and on-premise applications. With pre-built connectors and a low-code orchestration engine, you can create tailored integrations. Apigee stands out as an intelligent, scalable platform in API management. It was designed to simplify data exchange and link cloud services, platforms, and applications. Recognised as a leader in API management, Apigee holds a 12.8% market mindshare in 2024 according to Gartner.

II. Benefits

Developers thrive on APIs, but they aren’t the only ones benefiting from Apigee. Businesses also see a strong return on investment from using application management systems. Let’s explore how both sides succeed with Apigee.

Benefits for Developers:

• Accelerated Development & Innovation:
  • Self-Service APIs & Centralised Control: Apigee’s centralised repository and self-service capabilities, combined with application integration, allow developers to quickly discover and use existing APIs and data.
  • Increased Automation & Focus: Apigee automates tedious tasks like API documentation and SDK creation, freeing developers to focus on core business logic and innovative features.
  • Simplified Legacy System Interaction: Apigee unlocks legacy data by converting SOAP to RESTful APIs. Developers can easily integrate modern applications with valuable older data, avoiding complex custom integrations.
• Enhanced Efficiency & Productivity:
  • Streamlined Data Flow: Apigee’s proxy layer capabilities ensure efficient and secure data exchange between disparate applications. Developers rely on a consistent, controlled flow of information, reducing integration headaches.
  • AI-driven Troubleshooting & Optimisation: Apigee’s AI-driven analytics give developers deep insights into API usage. When issues arise in integrated workflows, these analytics quickly pinpoint problems, reducing debugging time and boosting application performance.
  • Cloud-Ready & Flexible Deployment: Apigee’s cloud-ready nature aligns with flexible application deployments in modern IT environments. Developers can build and deploy integrated applications anywhere.

Benefits for Businesses:

• Automated & Streamlined Operations:
  • End-to-End Workflow Automation: Apigee’s API management and general application integration enable comprehensive automation of business processes. From customer onboarding to order fulfilment, repetitive tasks are automated, reducing manual effort and errors.
  • Improved Operational Efficiency & Accuracy: Real-time data sharing, facilitated by Apigee’s proxy layer and integration principles, ensures all connected applications access up-to-date information. This eliminates data inconsistencies and improves accuracy across business operations.
• Enhanced Customer Experiences:
  • Seamless Customer Journeys: Integrating front- and back-office applications via Apigee’s managed APIs provides a better customer experience. An online purchase can instantly update loyalty programmes or trigger personalised recommendations without manual intervention.
  • Personalised & Responsive Services: The ability to integrate diverse data sources (including legacy systems unlocked by Apigee) allows businesses a complete customer view. This enables highly personalised recommendations and more responsive customer service.
• Scalability & Future-Proofing:
  • Handling High Transaction Volumes: Apigee’s inherent scalability directly supports integrated application growth. As businesses expand, the integration infrastructure scales to meet demand.
  • Unlocking New Business Opportunities: Easily exposing legacy data through APIs and integrating new applications unlocks new revenue streams and faster innovation. This agility helps businesses adapt to market demands and deliver new services quickly.
• Stronger Security & Control:
  • Centralised Security Management: Apigee’s centralised API control and proxy layer allow businesses to apply consistent security policies, rate limits, and access controls across all integrated applications. This creates a unified security posture for all data.
  • Improved Visibility & Governance: AI-driven analytics offer deep insights into API usage and performance across the integrated landscape, aiding security audits, compliance, and overall governance of data exchange.

III. Core Functionalities

Apigee uniquely manages the entire API lifecycle within a single platform, using AI. This covers design, development, security, deployment, publishing, monitoring, analysis, and monetisation. It ensures effective and secure delivery of user-friendly APIs for app developers. 

Apigee’s AI Functionalities

APIs connect intelligent applications and models. This is where Apigee truly shines, offering a comprehensive platform to manage, secure, and scale these crucial connections.

Let’s look at how Apigee gives businesses a crucial edge with AI:

• Turbocharged API Development: Apigee, especially with Gemini Code Assist, uses AI to help you build APIs faster and more consistently. Think AI-powered design, automated summaries, and quick identification of duplicates – all leading to rapid development for your AI initiatives.
• Your AI’s Central Command: Apigee acts as a unified gateway for Large Language Models (LLMs). It simplifies how your applications interact with various LLMs, ensuring top-notch security, streamlined key management, and detailed analytics for all your AI interactions.
• Bulletproof AI Security: With Google Cloud’s Model Armor integration, Apigee provides essential security for your AI workloads. It screens prompts and responses, guarding against threats like prompt injection and data loss, keeping your AI models safe.
• Optimised Performance & Cost: Apigee helps your AI applications run smoother and more cost-effectively. Features like semantic caching reduce latency by intelligently storing similar AI responses, thereby improving overall performance. Smart routing directs queries to the most suitable AI model, balancing speed and quality.
• Effortless AI Traffic Management: Apigee acts like your AI traffic controller. It expertly distributes traffic across your AI model endpoints, ensuring high availability and resilience. It also makes A/B testing new AI models a breeze.
• Empowering AI Developers: Through its Developer Portal, Apigee offers a self-service hub for AI models. Developers can easily discover, integrate, and monitor AI capabilities, accelerating innovation across your organisation.

Apigee embraces an AI-first approach to API management. By integrating AI throughout the API lifecycle – from predictive analytics to autonomous security – businesses can build, deploy, and scale their AI initiatives with confidence and efficiency.

Apigee Functionalities for every API lifecycle stage

Here’s what Apigee helps you do at each stage of the lifecycle:

1. Design

The design phase focuses on delivering real value and meeting business requirements rather than simply creating interfaces for backends. Apigee supports the OpenAPI specification (formerly Swagger) for sophisticated API design. The API design specification can be stored directly on Apigee or in your preferred repository, such as Git. Designing the API first provides a clear vision, is cost-effective, and enables collaboration. Additionally, it allows parallel development, so you can mock the API for consumers while the backend is still under development.

2. Develop

This stage involves using the API specification to generate an API proxy. Development and maintenance are configured on Apigee X, which provides all the necessary features for API management. It is a browser-based interface where developers can create, configure, and maintain APIs. It allows for creating API proxies by editing code, tracing request flows, adding/modifying policies, handling messages, logging, rate limiting, security, analytics, configuring environments, deploying, testing, and more. Apigee enables API proxy creation using an OpenAPI specification, saving time compared to creating an API from scratch. By reading the basepath and methods from the specification, Apigee can generate an API in a few clicks.

3. Secure   

API security is a core strength of Apigee. It offers built-in features like OAuth 2.0, API key validation, access control, basic authentication, JSON/XML threat protection, JWT, LDAP, and SAML. Furthermore, Apigee leverages Google’s substantial investments in multi-layered security across its infrastructure.

4. Publish

Beyond deployment, Apigee offers a sophisticated way to publish APIs to a dedicated portal: Apigee Developer (Drupal-based). This portal provides services for building a customised website to list APIs, onboard app developers, and offer resources like forums, blogs, and FAQs. This aids API administration, developer education, and onboarding workflows.

5. Scale

Scalability is essential for handling growing workloads and uninterrupted API calls. Apigee Cloud manages this through auto-scaling groups, handling workload peaks without customer intervention.

6. Monitor 

Continuous environment monitoring ensures application availability. Apigee’s monitoring dashboard allows operations teams to track API health and receive anomaly alerts, enabling quick service restoration. See how you can unlock deeper API insights using Apigee and Looker.

7. Analyse 

Apigee automatically gathers API and data information, using AI analytics to deepen understanding of API usage. It offers comprehensive reports on proxy performance, target performance, cache performance, and developer engagement. These insights help with troubleshooting, development, security, and optimisation.

8. Monetise 

While not all companies monetise their APIs, Apigee provides flexible monetisation controls. It allows enforcement by developers, developer groups, pre-/post-plans, and variable/fixed rates.

IV. Use Cases

How does Apigee change businesses in practice? Let’s examine some real-life examples of companies benefiting from Apigee.

Eneco Group enhanced feature development and time-to-market: Eneco Group partnered with Devoteam to unlock its Apigee API Management platform’s full potential. The goal was to accelerate digital transformation and sustainable energy initiatives. Devoteam’s solution involved an architectural review, improving security policies, development workflows, code quality, and user analytics. Experts also empowered Eneco’s app developers with an improved API Developer portal and standardised the API development lifecycle.

Grupo BC used Apigee for digital transformation: Grupo BC, a major banking and real estate outsourcing firm, successfully underwent digital transformation with Devoteam’s help. Leveraging Google Cloud’s Apigee, they modernised operations and overcame challenges from nearly 40 years of experience. Facing urgent needs to launch new products, boost efficiency, integrate diverse units, and manage a complex multi-tenant environment globally, Grupo BC chose Apigee for its cloud focus and intelligent proxy management. Devoteam helped the company to implement Apigee Adapter for Envoy to tackle latency in AI and document management services, ensuring local traffic routing for optimal performance, governance and security.

Apigee powers PUMA’s retail experience and real-time inventory: PUMA, a leading sports brand, uses Apigee for API management and establishing common data standards. This allows its retail partners, regardless of digital maturity, seamless access to digital services and insights without changing existing IT systems. Apigee empowers localised experiences with consistent, world-class data security and operational intelligence, minimising disruption. It truly enhances the online shopping experience by enabling real-time inventory access.

Apigee fuels Tieto’s digital lending platform and bank integration: Tieto, a leading Nordic system integrator, adopted the Apigee API management platform to empower its retail bank clients across Europe. Implementing Apigee as a crucial middle layer for its lending and leasing platform, Tieto enables banks to integrate with diverse third-party services and comply with open banking regulations without altering existing IT systems. Tieto manages the entire credit lifecycle from origination to collections and provides real-time monitoring of API traffic. Apigee positions Tietoevry to help its banking customers meet regulatory deadlines and explore future monetisation opportunities for their API-driven services, fostering innovative applications in an open banking ecosystem.

V. Understanding Apigee Pricing

Apigee’s tiered pricing strategy supports business growth as demand and usage increase. Organisations can progress upwards through the tiers.

Apigee offers three flexible pricing options: Evaluation, Pay-as-you-go, and Subscription. This tiered approach allows businesses to scale as their needs evolve.

Plan	Description	Price	When to Use
Evaluation	Free trial to test the platform.	Free for 60 days.	Ideal for exploring Apigee’s features without commitment.
Pay-as-you-go	Monthly charges based on usage (API calls, analytics, network).	API calls: From $20 per 1M (up to 50M). Environments: From $365 per month per region. Proxy deployments: $0.04 per hour per region. Add-ons: From $20 per 1M API calls.	Suitable for fluctuating usage.
Subscription	Fixed annual cost includes a predefined number of API calls.	Pricing across several tiers, from 180 million to 12 billion calls.	Designed for growing demand. 3 tiers: Standard, Enterprise (for high volume and partner engagement), and Enterprise Plus (for API-first businesses).

Get in touch to find the best pricing for your use case.

VI. Getting Started with Apigee: Working with a Partner

Not sure where to begin your Apigee journey? Read our Apigee Checklist: Implementation Best Practices or consider joining forces with a trusted Apigee partner.

As a Google Cloud Apigee and Application Integration Partner, Devoteam helps companies start and succeed with Apigee. Clients can count on Devoteam’s experts for designing, customising, and scaling APIs.

Here are the benefits of working with an Apigee partner like Devoteam:

• Simplified API Management: Partners streamline complex API setups, automating processes and reducing manual effort for efficient operations.
• Enhanced Security: Experts implement automated security features, protecting against issues and attacks, ensuring API safety.
• Improved Performance: Partners boost API performance to reliably handle high traffic volumes, leading to better application responsiveness.
• Full API Visibility: Experts centralise all APIs, providing easy control and usage for businesses.
• Seamless Integration: Apigee partners bridge older business systems with new cloud applications securely and efficiently.
• New Revenue Streams: They facilitate offering and selling APIs to partners and developers, enabling new business opportunities.

VII. Conclusion

To answer my question from the title of this guide, there are two reasons why you need Apigee more than ever. The growing reliance on APIs for digital transformation, coupled with the explosion of AI applications, makes a secure and scalable API management platform like Apigee an indispensable tool for businesses aiming to innovate, operate efficiently, and maintain a competitive edge. Both developers and businesses gain significant benefits from Apigee. Accelerated innovation, streamlined operations, enhanced customer experiences and future-proof scalability are just a few ways Apigee drives ROI.

Ready to try it yourself? Use flexible pricing options to test it or connect with our experts, who will set you up for success with Apigee!