[MUSIC PLAYING]
AGV: Let's say you or your company
built an application a while back,
and now you would like to bring it up
to snuff and offer features that modern apps have today.
For example, you may want to enable
voice ordering or mobile payments,
or you may want to make it easy for other developers
to integrate into your app.
Or maybe you would like to create a unified experience
across different lines of business and multiple back end
services.
In this episode, I will cover how Google's API management
tool, called Apigee, helps organizations create
digital experiences for both older back end
services, microservices, hybrid or multi-cloud environments,
and fully serverless stacks.
API stands for Application Programming Interface,
and it's like a library of functions that passes
information over the web.
It defines the inputs and outputs available over HTTP.
For example, let's say you are a logistics company,
and you would like to enable your partners
to integrate your package tracking service
into their e-commerce website.
You then create an API that takes shipment details
as inputs and returns a tracking ID in the response.
Another API uses the tracking ID to check
the status of the package.
This now makes your service portable.
You can create services not just for partners,
but for your customers, employees, vendors, et cetera.
There are two developer audiences
that most benefit from an API management tool.
There are those that build and manage
APIs, known as the producers, and those that use the APIs,
a.k.a.
consumers.
Now, the challenge to the producer
is to design an easy-to-use API, keep developers abreast
of changes, and ensure things do not
break as functionality evolves.
They also have to consider three core design components
such as how will I prevent unauthorized access
to keep things secure?
How compatible will my services be
when working with other platforms and devices?
And finally, how can I measure that things
are running smoothly?
As you can quickly see, that's a lot of layers to consider here.
Then there are consumers of APIs who
need to easily discover and find the APIs they need
and then quickly understand how to use them.
And API is really only useful if it can easily
be adopted by other developers.
So with these audiences in mind, Apigee
helps manage the entire lifecycle of an API.
Let me discuss three key pillars.
The first is it offers a supportive
portal for other developers to discover your APIs,
rapidly understand them with the intention
that they can build applications with them.
The second is monitoring and analytics.
These are available so that your API program
managers can see which APIs are used most and how.
You can also receive alerts when appropriate.
The third is the API runtime, which
executes the policies you configure
for security, traffic management, and efficiency
of your APIs.
What is especially nice is that you can make changes
without disrupting users because Apigee
is a proxy that isolates the app developer from your back end
service.
For example, you can change your database implementation,
move your services to a new host,
or make any other changes to the service implementation,
and by maintaining a consistent front end API,
existing client apps will continue
to work regardless of how changes occur in the back end.
You also create one or more API proxies
that map publicly available URLs to your back end services.
A proxy is the HTTP endpoint on Apigee
that developers use to access your back end services.
You can optionally apply policies
on a proxy to also add functionality to a service
without having to make any changes to the actual back end
service such as data transformations, filtering,
conditional logic, custom code, and many other actions.
The important thing to remember is
that you implement policies on Apigee, not
on your back end server.
Next, you bundle the API proxies and publish them
in an API product.
Next, you let your developers know that the API
product is available.
And once app developers know about the availability
of your API product, they can register
as an app developer for your API product,
create an app to obtain an API key for that API product,
and finally make requests to your services,
passing the API key with each request.
And there you have it.
A quick walkthrough on how Apigee
helps create robust digital experiences
by leveraging APIs and having a tool
set and portal to manage them.
If you would like to learn more, this
is only episode one of a series of short videos
to help you get started.
Also, in this video's description,
we have several helpful links.
And friends, if you found this episode helpful,
you can click like or subscribe to the channel.
Cheers.