Application program interfaces (APIs) have the potential to transform the way you conduct business. They can reduce operational costs and friction, drastically reduce time to market for IT, enable new digital business models, and revolutionize your customer’s journey. We partner with Google and Apigee, a leader in full lifecycle API management software, to provide solutions that allow you to gain control and visibility into the APIs that connect applications and data across the enterprise.
To fully embrace the power of APIs with Apigee, here are some best practices to keep in mind:
1. Enforce consistent security and governance
When developers deploy microservices in the public cloud without API security standards or consistent global policies, they expose the business to potential security breaches. Companies must assume a zero-trust environment. Apigee enables enterprises to implement security and governance policies across all their APIs.
2. Drive end-to-end visibility
Without usage and performance data about your microservices and cloud workloads, it’s difficult to understand the extent to which these services are reused, or potential performance concerns. Especially in larger organizations or around APIs for external use, this can create a management challenge.
API platforms provide analytics and reporting capabilities to measure API usage, developer and partner engagement, microservices adoption, and traffic composition. Organizations use API analytics to monitor API performance by analyzing total traffic, throughput, latency, and errors.
3. Make services easily discoverable and reusable
As organizations employ multiple microservices stacks, clouds, and PaaS environments, it can be difficult for teams to discover and reuse microservices and APIs. Internal and external app developers use developer portals to discover services, register to use APIs, access interactive and community documentation, register their apps, and view data about their app usage on a dashboard.
4. Co-exist with microservices orchestration frameworks
App teams are adopting a variety of microservices orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. Although there is some overlap in the gateway functionality between the microservices stack and API management, most organizations combine their API management with their microservices and PaaS gateway/routers to ensure visibility across the organization.
5. Don’t adopt cloud-specific gateways
All public cloud providers offer their own captive API gateways that provide core functions like traffic management, simple meditation, and caching. For most businesses, cloud-specific gateways are too limited as they’re unable to unify data across a multi-cloud environment. Instead of using one specific gateway, businesses have the power to manage all APIs, no matter what cloud they live in.
Why Perficient
We partner with Apigee to complement and extend your API management strategy and implementation expertise. Our team of certified experts provides end-to-end solutions for enterprise-scale API management wherever you are in your digital transformation journey.
