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RETO MEIER: I'm Reto Meier.
STEPHANIE WONG: And I'm Stephanie Wong
here with Amit Zavery, VP of Engineering, to dive into APIs.
Welcome and thanks for joining us here.
AMIT ZAVERY: Sure.
Thanks for having me.
STEPHANIE WONG: So I want to talk
about APIs, which have come a long way
from the software interfaces popularized by Win32 APIs.
Tell us where they are today and your predictions for API
in 2019 and where AP Apigee lies in this space?
AMIT ZAVERY: Sure.
Sure.
I think they look at what's going on in the industry today.
There are many things which are driving
the modernization of a lot of existing applications, right.
So APIs are becoming the front end to a lot of the assets
companies have already in their portfolio.
And they unlock a lot of those content for different kind
of users, be it end users, be it partners, as well as employees.
So I think if you look at going forward in 2019,
you'll start seeing a lot of different ways of exposing
those APIs.
One, a lot of companies are using,
trying to monetize on them, to be able to kind of use that
to create a lot of new content, as well as partnerships.
So we have a lot of good examples of customers,
like say Magazine Luiza in Brazil,
who is trying to create a lot of e-commerce kind of content
and be able to expose a lot of data to the end user to buy it.
Same thing with AccuWeather, where
they want to be able to now take a lot of the weather data
and share it and make it available to a lot of other end
users as well.
So that's one kind of driving factor.
Second thing is popularization of a lot of ways of interfacing
through voice and text.
[INAUDIBLE],, UC, of course, a different kind
of consumer devices.
And that requires a lot of interfaces
into the back end systems, and be
able to expose it through voice and text.
So that's also driving a lot of interest
from companies to be able to use API management for that.
And third area we've seen a lot of driving factor,
and you'll see a lot of it as we move forward,
is a lot of industry requirements.
So there's a lot of open standards coming out, a lot
of regulations coming out.
And APIs is the one way to log the content
and make sure they're secured and they are
available to the right people.
So that's another complete new requirement
we're seeing, and becoming very popular as we move forward.
RETO MEIER: That's exciting.
Now, obviously, a lot of APIs that drive ecosystems
are publicly visible.
But many of the APIs at any given company
are only used internally.
How does Apigee support both of those use cases?
AMIT ZAVERY: Sure.
So I think the way we have built our platform at the Apigee area
was to really make sure that anybody who
wants to expose API, we provide them
ways to manage the whole process,
be it internal or external users.
And so the platform is really kind of agnostic of that fact.
But we, of course, provide a lot of safeguarding
when it's externally exposed.
A lot of the right kind of regulations,
the right kind of permissions, security elements are built in.
Similarly inside when you're trying to expose it
inside the enterprise.
And we do use it between different employees
for different application development.
Again, we provide the whole lifecycle management for it.
So there are a lot of, again, capabilities
for a developer to use and leverage
when they're building those applications.
And they can decide the rules and how
and what is to be shared.
And a lot features kind of build in to really made that happen.
STEPHANIE WONG: And a lot of companies
are now looking towards microservices.
But microservices will continue to have
a lot of different recipes.
Successful microservice architecture
is complex to design, build, and manage
and there are a lot of experimentation going on.
But the key is to build reusable decoupled services that
can scale with the right levels of governance.
How is Apigee helping to support microservice architecture?
AMIT ZAVERY: I think general--
if you look at the architecture evolution in general,
it's idea is to really have small kind of services,
and kind of decoupled in a way.
Right?
And then the best way to use those services is
through an API.
So what Apigee does is, now that we have interfaces
to a lot of the microservices management layer,
and for example, Istio, which Google provides as a service,
allows you to now expose those microservices,
manage them in a much better way, and orchestrate
and kind of do a lot of monitoring around it.
And what we do with Apigee is we integrate with Istio
and really provide the ability to manage
those APIs through one of those channels, one way.
Otherwise, if you have other microservices, you have an API,
we can of course manage that lifecycle for that
and allow you to use those microservices
in a much better fashion than a [INAUDIBLE] application would
be.
RETO MEIER: Nice.
Can you talk a little bit about the new general availability
release of Apigee Edge for a private cloud?
AMIT ZAVERY: Yeah.
I think the way we're looking at Apigee in general
is to have a deployment model which is flexible.
All right?
So one is to be able to, of course,
you can continue using it On-Prem.
Second thing is to be able to now take it in the cloud.
We have an Apigee Edge product that's available in the cloud,
as well, fully managed by Google.
Third is this hybrid mechanism, where
you can have some of the runtime running anywhere you choose,
be it the private cloud or On-Premise,
you can be running on Kubernetes with GKE,
and the control plane is running in the cloud.
And that could be in any cloud, could
be Google or any third party cloud, as well.
So we try to make sure the architecture is very flexible,
giving choices to the customers and developers
to really deploy the way they would want to.
And specifically with Edge, we do provide a private cloud
edition where you can run on GKE.
And GKE On-Premise can be available anywhere,
if you ever want to choose to deploy it.
And we allow you to kind of have it very easy to manage
and easy to deploy.
So that's available today and we continue to make progress
in that area.
STEPHANIE WONG: That's exciting.
So we know that APIs and building APIs
isn't just enough, you have to actually convince
your developers to use them and that means
developer portals become key.
How does Apigee's Developer Portal and its enhancements
help that happen?
AMIT ZAVERY: Yeah.
I think to tie everything together
you have to have a structure where this information can
be available.
Right?
So the developers, of course, would
love to have one way in terms of how you manage the APIs,
but how you expose it is to a developer portal.
So Apigee provides a lot of capabilities
on the Developer Portal site.
So we have a customer facing portal, a partner facing
portal, all the lifecycle for getting API into the portal,
as well all the services that are available.
So the developer doesn't have to do a lot of the heavy lifting,
in terms of how to share that content, how
things get the right kind of security around it.
So the Developer Portal today is available to all
of our products and we keep on making enhancements to it.
There's one offering to Drupal as well, to a third party
CMS if a customer chooses to use a heavy duty portal
and has a lot more capabilities for a lot of specific things,
custom work you might want to do.
But we also have an integrated portal as part
of our offering today, which is very simple, easy to use,
and you can create a lot of portal interfaces for end users
very quickly and easily.
RETO MEIER: That's great.
Now Apigee is built on best practice
to help create world-class developer experiences, right?
So tell me a little bit more about that.
AMIT ZAVERY: I think in general--
I think, just not Apigee, you can look at Google,
we've been trying to make sure the Google Cloud makes
developer experience very friendly.
Right?
And I think one of the key things for developers
is a lifecycle of, how do you create an application
and deliver that.
And the one big part of that is the API management for it,
in terms of the whole lifecycle.
So we have made sure, for a developer,
it's very easy to onboard.
They can start writing an API.
They can start documenting it, testing it, and design
and delivering it.
So we provide a lot of tooling for that, very simple,
easy to use.
And what we've been doing beyond that
is really now kind of giving you metering,
monitoring, monetization.
So now you have an idea of who's using what, what kind
of security you have, what kind of privileges
were provided to that user, as well as what kind of usage
you got out of it, and how much money you can make out.
So you have a lot of that data available to
at your fingertips.
So we've been doing a lot of work
to really add a lot of this value add, beyond just being
able to build an API and deliver it,
but also all the things you needed on monitoring, metering,
security, monetization.
So that's really becoming a very powerful element
into the feature capabilities for developers and anybody
else who do this work.
STEPHANIE WONG: Thank you so much, Amit.
We packed a lot of info into our talk, so thanks for your time.
AMIT ZAVERY: Oh, thanks for having me.
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