The Apigee API platform provides services to help you create, grow and maintain your API program. Whether you are just starting to plan your enterprise API or scaling to support millions of customers, Apigee adds critical capabilities you need, including:
- A flexible policy model to transform your existing APIs to create business agility
- End-to-end operational and business analytics for the API team, developers, and operations
- A developer portal to attract and empower developers
The Apigee API platform
The Apigee API platform includes Gateway services, Developer channel services, and Analytics services. Together they provide a solid enterprise foundation so that operators can plug the API into existing systems and take advantage of valuable databases, security frameworks, management infrastructure, and operational tools.
Gateway services
Apigee's Gateway services let you set up and manage your API programs. Apigee's interface provides tools for adding and configuring your APIs, setting up bundles of resources and managing developers and apps. It offloads many common management concerns from your backend API. When you add an API, you can apply policies for security, rate-limiting, mediation, caching, and so on. You can also customize the behavior of your API by applying custom scripts, making call outs to third-party APIs, and so on. Using the Apigee analytics features, you can get detailed metrics about how your API is used.
While the management UI lets you perform most API management tasks, you can also control your policies and APIs by sending commands directly to the gateway using your favorite command-line interface or REST console. See Introduction to get started with local API development.
App Services
App Services is a backend as a service solution that enables developers to get their apps up and running quickly. Set up your own cloud-based data platform in minutes instead of months. App Services manages objects and aids in the development of mobile client applications. It provides a core set of commonly used social media application objects, including a rich user model, as well as the ability to create new objects and object collections. See What is App Services? for more information.
Developer channel services
Apigee's Developer channel services provide templates for content and community management. Our developer portal template lets API providers quickly launch a developer portal. It is based on the open source Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) project. The default setup allows creating and managing API documentation, forums, and a blog. A built-in test console allows API call tracing in real time from within the portal. Apart from content management, the portal has various features for community management such as manual or automatic user registration and moderating user comments. A Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model controls access to portal features. For example, you can enable controls to allow registered users to create forum posts or use test consoles. See What is a developer portal? for more.
Analytics services
Analytics services provides powerful API analytics to see long-term usage trends. You can segment your audience by top developers and apps, understand usage by API method to know where to invest, and create custom reports on business-level information.
As data passes through Apigee gateway, several default types of information are collected including URL, IP, user ID for API call information, latency, error data, and so on. You can use policies to add other information, such as headers, query parameters, and portions of a request or response extracted from XML or JSON.
All data is pushed to analytics where it is persisted by the analytics server in the background. Data aggregation jobs compile various built-in or custom reports. See Monitor the performance of your API for more.
