Observations on API and Mashup Management API and Mashup Blog

On Availability

We've built Apigee as a highly available (HA) service because Apigee's users depend on us to deliver their traffic. More than anything we have to ensure that our services and proxies are as transparent and as light as possible. Much of the magic behind our proxying technologies comes from our cluster of Sonoa's ServiceNet boxes, which efficiently balance the proxy load and in worst-case scenarios failover to other parts of the cluster. And to test the responsiveness of our systems and people, Brian, Apigee's GM, sometimes conducts surprise fire drills in the middle of the night.

Manoj debugging during the holiday party

In mid-December, we noticed some strange patterns in our daily traffic reports, and we set out to investigate. While the ServiceNet proxies are highly available, other parts of the system, while important, are somewhat less mission-critical. Eventually we discovered that one customer's database tables were impacting the performance of our analytics server—to the point that it was unable to keep up with all the traffic statistics, making it appear as if traffic had dropped. It appeared like we had suffered a big dip in traffic, even though no proxies had been directly affected. This may have affected other accounts as well, so if in mid-December you noticed any unexpected fluctuation in your Apigee analytics, it may have been related to this.

So what have we done to address this? First, we scrambled to work with the customer who had the massive table in our database. That traffic comes from an iPhone app, which means that lots of dynamic IP addresses were blowing the table out of proportion. We worked directly with them to find a better way to identify the traffic, and this fixed things for everyone. It also taught us more about the needs and use-cases of our developers.

Even more importantly, we've identified a weakness in our architecture, and we're moving to address that with engineering. First, we're building a redundant system to make the handoff from the proxy cluster to the analytics server more robust (and also essentially highly available). Furthermore, we're planning to implement technologies to distribute the database queries to better serve analytics report generation. These changes will start to rollout over the next month or so.

The good news is that we're growing and getting better all time. If you have any questions or comments about our response or how you'd prefer us to handle these situations in the future, please comment or post in our support forum. We're listening, and we really want to hear from you.

New features:  SSL support and “Remember-me”

Recently we rolled out two new Apigee capabilities.

First, we've added SSL support for APIs that support the HTTPS protocol. Now you can create an Apigee proxy for an API secured by HTTPS—such as the PayPal API—just specify 'https' in the API URL when creating a proxy. You could also change an existing HTTP proxy to an HTTPS proxy. (Of course, the API in question must support HTTPS, else you'll get an error.)

We're also working on adding SSL support for API providers that want to map to their own domain URL (and therefore their own certificate). Stay tuned, and you can review and comment on our proposed SSL Solution at anytime on our community area.   (You will see that we've completed sections 1 and 4 of the proposal to date..)

Secondly, we've added 'remember me' functionality on log-in.  We'll remember your login for 2 weeks so you don't have to specify your password, just head to app.apigee.com to see your proxies. This also means you can bookmark a favorite chart.

Thanks for the continued feedback—we're prioritizing features based directly on your input!

Recent Apigee upgrades and fixes

Earlier this week we released significant UI upgrades for Apigee. We also fixed some bugs identified in our feedback forum.

(We should mention that you won't lose API messages during our planned upgrades - we use a HA architecture so we don't have to schedule downtime.)

The big one is that now the cool screens in the demo video - the animated API setup and proxy rate limiting dialogues (as in this video) - are now live for everyone.  They include some usability tweaks identified by our preview members - thanks.

We also fixed some bugs you found in the API Requests Table and with editing API nicknames.

Here's an overview of the  UI highlights and below are details on more features coming soon.

What's coming next

We're prioritizing our backlog directly based on your feedback.  Coming up soon:

Support for HTTPS & SSL. Thanks to everyone that commented on the solution proposal.

Proxies will come in 2 flavors -  consumer and provider, and we're including Apigee status info in the response header

Finally, we're thrilled when one of our community members suggest a better solution than we had planned.   We love this idea to make IP addresses human friendly.

Thanks again and please keep the ideas coming!

Welcome to Apigee!

Welcome to the Apigee Blog! 

Apigee is a website that can give you analytics and throttling for APIs.  Think of it kind of as a cross between “Google Analytics for APIs” and an API circuit-breaker that will protect your app from any traffic spike on your API.  It’s ‘freemium’ , self-service API management.

Apigee works by giving you a proxy that takes metrics and enforces rate-limiting and other policies on your API traffic as it flows.  So if you offer an open API - you can use Apigee between your API and customers to provide usage statistics and protect your back end with API throttling.  Or if you have an application that uses an API, such as an iPhone app or a mashup - you can create a proxy for an API you are using in the app (such as Yahoo Local’s search API) and hit the API through your Apigee proxy to get alerts if that API is not working as it should.  Or to double-check if your service is delivering to SLA or if someone is billing you for API usage.

Apigee is currently in a private preview and we’re hoping you’ll sign up for an invite.  We’re adding a few accounts every day, so it might be a few days. It would be a big help if you can tell us about your API and what you’d like to do.

Apigee is built by Sonoa Systems on our Sonoa ServiceNet platform - this is the same technology platform that we use for our enterprise customers doing high scale, complex API and policy management.  We try to write everything we’ve learned about API technology and management over on our API Infrastructure blog.

And there’s more about Apigee on the FAQ, we’re @apigee on twitter, and you’ll also see a ‘feedback’ tab floating around the margin of this page as well - so we hope you will tell us what you think and give Apigee a spin !