Apigee Tutorial

Today is the new era of digitalization with artificial intelligence and virtual reality. And aiming to lead the competitive market is becoming challenging; everything needs to be digitalized, so it is obvious to learn API and Apigee Edge. So, here we are with a detailed Apigee Tutorial to help you with all you need.

The name of Sona systems founded Apigee in 2004. As time passed, it became a cloud computing and applications company. Finally, in 2010, it was known as "Apigee" and then acquired by Google in 2016. Recently in December 2022 and January 2023, the company announced new and updated versions of the following;

• Apigee UI 
• Apigee Integration Software
• Apigee connectors 
• Apigee hybrid software v1.8.3, and many more.

In this Apigee tutorial for Beginners, you'll be able to understand the need to use it and the advantages you get. It is a beginner's guide. You may check Apigee's latest updates here.

Apigee Tutorial - Table of Contents: What is Apigee?  Why Should You Use Apigee? Features of Apigee  Basic Terminology  What is Apigee Edge?  Advantages of using Apigee Edge  Development Tools  What is API Proxy? Key Points of API Proxy Development Conclusion

What is Apigee?

Apigee is a company that offers a platform that enables users to create, manage, and maintain APIs. It is considered a reliable and efficient platform for the API. Now, if you wonder about API, let us clear that too.

In addition to providing security, rate limiting, quotas, analytics, and other features by fronting services using a proxy layer, Apigee also creates an abstraction or face to the backend service APIs.

 

Why Should You Use Apigee?

It is ranked no. #1 as compared to fellow competitors. Following are some of the use cases of Apigee which help you understand your requirements and Apigee's efficiency through this Apigee tutorial;

• For behavioral testing (of the infrastructure, scaling, etc.)
• To recover from disasters
• To speed up API traffic for nearby services when legal and geographical boundaries are present.
• To continue processing messages even when there is no internet connection.
• For a microservices-based application to maintain API traffic within predetermined limitations for compliance and security reasons.
• To offer Apigee API management for Kubernetes-based services

Want to acquire industry skills and gain complete knowledge of Apigee? Enroll in Instructor-Led live Apigee Training to become Job Ready!

 

Features of Apigee 

A platform for managing and securely delivering all APIs, Apigee Edge Cloud. With features including API runtime, developer management, analytics, API development, and operations automation, Apigee Edge Cloud controls the API lifecycle.

A customizable site for publishing APIs and interactive documentation, as well as for onboarding developers and apps, is included in developer management.

1) Analytics has the following features: 

• Pre-built dashboards and visualizations 
• Special reports and queries
• Scheduled reports and offline queries
• Query optimizations and custom characteristics

2) API development includes:

• Transformation, traffic management, and security policies
• Programmable interface for configuring API proxies with Python, JavaScript, and Java callouts
• Debugging and trace capabilities
• API version control

 

Basic Terminology

1) API: API is described as Application Programming Interface responsible for communicating between two applications. 

Practical Example: The exchange of information between the airlines and travel sites.

Developers can quickly access and reuse application logic created by other developers thanks to APIs. The logic and information are made available through the network in the case of Web APIs.

2) API Product: An API product is an offering of an API made accessible for consumer usage that is made available to a target market to meet a client's needs.

Practical Example: Weather Forecasting Services 

A quota, service plan, and a set of API resources (URIs) are available to app developers during the design stage. For financial gain, API items are combined into API packages. An app and the collection of URIs that the app is allowed to consume are connected by an API key associated with one or more API products.

3) API Package: A grouping of API products offered to developers in a bundle and often went along with a pricing structure established for monetization.

4) API Resource Path: A resource path, a RESTful notion, is a standard resource identifier (URI) that shows the network route to a certain resource.

5) Organization: A collection of all the items in a given Apigee Edge| Apigee Tutorial accounts, such as developers, apps, and API proxies. One must have a user account for each organization to which they belong.

6) Environment: A context for the execution of API proxies at runtime. Before an API is available via the network, Install an API proxy in the environment. 

• During development, API proxies are often deployed in the test environment.
• After API proxies have been properly constructed and tested, they are often promoted from the test environment to the prod environment.

7) An API base path and resources: A set of API resources and a basic path make up an API. Each API proxy defines a basic path and potentially many other API resource pathways. An API can be considered a collection of URIs with the same base path.

Apigee provides display names and descriptions to these raw URIs to make managing your APIs simpler. One may manage and control the behavior of your APIs with great detail using Edge by adding policies and code to URIs.

Read these latest Apigee Interview Questions that help you grab high-paying jobs

 

What is Apigee Edge?

Apigee cloud computing company provides its users with a product called Apigee Edge. It is a Google-owned gateway management framework. Apigee supports data transfer among various cloud services and applications. 

RESTful APIs are widely used to supply the services and websites that users can access. API gateways serve as a connection point between these websites and services and the data and feeds they need to function properly. Apigee is a tool for managing an API gateway for creating, distributing, and building user-friendly apps.

 

Advantages of using Apigee Edge

There are many advantages or benefits of using Apigee Edge, and some of them are listed here in this Apigee tutorial;

1) Services visible on the web:

Today's businesses want their backend services accessible through the web so desktop and mobile applications can use them. A business can desire to advertise its sales and ordering, order monitoring, and information on product pricing and availability services. An HTTP request is then sent to these endpoints by the creators of client applications.

2) APIs and API Proxies:

Develop an API product. The Apigee HTTP endpoint developers use to access your backend services is an API proxy. Combining API proxies plus a service plan creates an API product. This service package can offer security, monitoring, analytics, and other capabilities and restrict API proxy access. The primary technique for granting access to and controlling permission for your APIs is provided by Apigee's API solutions. The crucial point is that Apigee, not your backend server, is where policies are executed. With API products, you have a lot of flexibility. The same API proxy, for instance, can be used by multiple API products.

3) API Product:

An API Product is a bundle of one or more APIs that are offered to developers as a single, named item. It allows API providers to group together multiple APIs and related resources into a single package, making it easier for developers to find and consume the APIs they need.

API Products typically include a set of policies and security measures that are applied to all of the included APIs, and can also include features such as rate limiting, analytics, and developer portal integration. Additionally, it allows monetizing the service via different pricing plans.

API products are useful for organizations that have multiple APIs, as it allows them to package and market their APIs in a way that makes them more accessible and usable for developers. It also provides the ability to control access to the APIs and to track usage and revenue generated by the APIs.

4) Monitoring and analytics with Apigee:

Apigee API Analytics is capable of examining short- and long-term patterns in API usage. You can use the API approach to decide where to spend, segment your audience based on the best app developers, and analyze usage by creating personalized reports using operational or business-level data. As data flows via Apigee, various default sorts of information are gathered, including URL, IP, user ID for API request information, latency, error data, and more. Policies are used to provide additional data, such as headers, query parameters, and specifics of an XML or JSON request or response. Since this information is extracted asynchronously from the actual request-and-response cycle, it is unrelated to API performance.

 

Development Tools

Development tools help a developer with seamless self-service and easy onboarding, interactive API documentation, analytics, and insights to understand usage patterns and also provide a developer with a custom-branded experience. One can create APIs as a service provider so that client apps can use them. They can utilize the UI or send HTTP requests to the APIs to access RESTful services to establish, configure, and maintain API proxies and API products, as explained in the following sections. Following are the tools provided by the team of Apigee edge listed in this Apigee tutorial.

1) Edge UI 

The Apigee user experiences (UIs) are browser-based tools for creating, configuring, and managing API proxies and API products like Edge, Apigee hybrid, and private cloud. The Edge UI is accessed via URL.

2) Use of Apigee UIs is to

• to change the code to build API proxies, then serve requests through those proxies.
• to oversee the creation of developer tools and APIs.
• to implement Node.js and JavaScript applications.
• to set up the production and test environments.
• after integrating several proxies to fulfill client requests to generate API goods.

The UI's API proxy editor is shown in the below image, where one may create and set up an API proxy:

3) Edge API

Edge's API resources can be managed using Apigee Edge APIs. Additionally, the API offers functions kept hidden by the UI and not accessible via the internet.

To access certain APIs, the user must first provide authentication information, such as a username and password, to the API endpoints. Any API resources used to invoke HTTP GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods per RESTful principles.

4) Debugging and Testing

An end-to-end request and response flow debugging tool is provided by Apigee. The trace results show the policy implementation, variable values, request and response headers and payloads, and any possible flow faults.

Important information for troubleshooting:

a) Use timestamps: To determine how long each step takes to complete. By comparing timestamps, you can identify the policies that are slowing down your API calls and taking the longest to execute.

b) Base path: You can ensure that a policy sends the message to the right server by checking the base path.

c) Results of using the policy: These outcomes enable you to determine whether the message has been altered as anticipated, such as when it is converted from XML to JSON or cached.

 

What is API Proxy?

By using API proxies, you expose APIs on Apigee Edge. API proxies isolate your backend services from your app-facing API, protecting those apps from changes to the backend code. Apps continue to call the same API unabated as you make backend adjustments to your services.

It secures, mediates, transforms, and extends.

Two sorts of endpoints are configured in an API proxy:

1) ProxyEndpoint: 

An API's ProxyEndpoint specifies how client apps will use it. To specify the URL of your API proxy, you configure the ProxyEndpoint. Apps can use HTTP or HTTPS to access the API proxy, depending on the proxy endpoint. To impose security, quota checks, various access control, and rate-limiting policies are typically attached to the ProxyEndpoint.

2) TargetEndpoint:

Specifies how your backend services and the API proxy will communicate. By setting up the TargetEndpoint's security options, HTTP or HTTPS protocol, and other connection details, you may direct requests to the appropriate backend service. To ensure that return messages are formatted correctly for the app that performed the initial request, you can apply policies to the TargetEndpoint.

• During development, API proxies are often deployed in the test environment.
• After API proxies have been properly constructed and tested, they are often promoted from the test environment to the prod environment. promoted from the test environment to the prod environment.

 

Key Points of API Proxy Development

1) Access state values through flow variables made by API proxies:

Variables that represent the execution state are accessible to API proxies. These variables are accessible through the XML to set up API proxies and policies. They are also available if you use a procedural language, like Java, JavaScript, or Python, to enhance an API proxy.

2) One can make API proxies run under certain conditions:

Like most programming languages, API proxies allow you to execute code conditionally. The API proxy state, accessed through flow variables, is frequently the basis for conditions. For instance, create a condition that executes the request after checking the user agent.

3) The handling of API proxy problems:

 Customization of the error delivered to an API client by creating a fault handler. Whether an issue is caused by your code or by a component included, fault handlers allow you control over how it is communicated.

4) The Debug tool is used for debugging a proxy:

When debugging and testing, you can utilize Apigee's Debug tool to look at the execution flow of your API proxy. The tool visibly displays each API proxy step that executes a request. Inspect the list of variable values that make up the API proxy state at each step, much like a debugger.

 

Conclusion:

Apigee has now become a very useful and updated platform for businesses to go digital and mark their victories in their respective industries. Thanks to API management, businesses can build, implement, secure, scale, and analyze APIs. Apigee also helps organizations exchange data and services in a secure manner across numerous channels and gadgets. This Apigee tutorial for Beginners explains the concepts thoroughly to get the best knowledge about the Apigee Edge.