Why Apigee is Awesome

When we announced the joint hybrid cloud partnership Cisco has developed with Google, Kip Compton revealed the pieces of the solution with this high level diagram:

Between now and GA, I’ll be discussing some details on the individual components of the solution that make up the combined whole, starting with a Google component you may not be familiar with called Apigee.

What Is Apigee?

Google acquired Apigee back in September of 2016 but the core technology dates back as far as 2004 and prior to becoming part of Google, Apigee had their IPO in August of 2015.  As the name implies, Apigee makes it easier to create developer-friendly APIs with modern REST interfaces and access keys.  It can automate the creation of documentation and SDKs for an API as well, including monetization services so that an organization can easily create a community for developers interested in their back-end data.

Apigee includes a ton of monitoring and analytics tools and a sophisticated security model so that any company can take an existing back end and safely expose some or all of it to outside developers.

Apigee and the Cisco/Google Hybrid Cloud Partnership

A refreshing aspect of Google’s attitude towards public cloud is its admission that not all workloads will leave the corporate data center.  Many SAP implementations contain data some feel is not appropriate outside the friendly confines of a corporate firewall and some Oracle databases are large enough that getting them into a public cloud environment without interrupting service is tricky.  For those and other reasons, there are just some things that organizations might want to keep in their data centers.

But how do you balance the desire to keep some data in a traditional corporate data center with the needs of line of business team developers eager to innovate?

This is exactly where Apigee can make such a big difference by putting a modern API front end to legacy data stores.  Now developers can deploy business logic on either the same private data center or the public cloud and access corporate data in a modern way.  IT Operations can analyze metrics to see who and how the data is being used.  A fundamental tenant of the Cisco and Google Hybrid Cloud solution is giving developers the ability to access data from anywhere, no matter where it resides.

Through access keys, Apigee provides Layer 7 security to this data, but what about setting up a secure connection between a piece of business logic running on the public cloud with this new API endpoint in a corporate data center?  That will be the topic for next time, as we discuss how virtualized network devices can be set up to form an encrypted and redundant connection using Google VPN and Cisco CSR100v’s.