What is meant by Apigee Edge?
Apigee Edge is defined as the platform for developing and managing APIs. With the fronting services with a proxy layer, Edge offers an abstraction or facade for the service of the APIs and also provides rate limiting, security, analytics, quotas, and so on.
For example, customers can view the webcast about how Walgreens uses APIs and Apigee Edge in order to offer a rich application ecosystem around the printing, photo prescriptions, and some other services that they are going to provide.
Making the web services available
Companies / organizations at present want to have their backend services that are available on the web such that those services can be consumed by applications in order to get running on desktops and mobile devices. A company / organization might be willing to expose the services that they offer the product pricing and can make the availability data / information, ordering services and sales, order tracking services, and any other such services needed by the customer applications.
Companies / organizations can expose the services as a set of endpoints HTTP. Client application developers can also make the requests of HTTP to these types of endpoints. The service might then return information / data, depending on the endpoint, formatted as JSON or XML, back to the customer application.
The customer applications can consume the services that are implemented as the standalone applications for a tablet or mobile device, as the HTML5 applications running in the browser, or as any other type of application can make the request to an endpoint of the HTTP and can consume the response information / data. These applications might be released and developed by the same organization / company which can be used to expose the services, or by third-party application developers who are known as the available services.
It is because the providers can make their web services available, they must have to ensure that they have taken all the required steps in order to secure their services from the access of unauthorization. Initially, as a service provider, one must have to consider the following things:
Measurability: How to monitor your services ?
Monetization: How can you track your service bills?
Security: How will you control access to your services ?
Compatibility: Will your services work across various platforms and devices or not?
After the customer client application has been released in order to access any of the services, the service is then needed to ensure that those services can continue to work over time as they modify, add, or delete the services. The service provider should also have the way of keeping the application developers aware of the changes in order to the services to make sure that the client applications stay in sync with other services.
Client application developers can face all the challenges when they are trying to consume services from multiple providers. There are many other technologies that are available at present for use by the service provider in order to expose their services. The same client application might have to make use of one mechanism in order to consume the service from at least one provider, and various mechanisms in order to consume a service from multiple providers. Application developers can also even face the situation where they have to use multiple mechanisms in order to consume the services from one provider.
Services through Apigee Edge:
Apigee Edge can enable the user / customer in order to provide the secured access to their services having a well-defined API which can be consistent across all of all the services irrespective of the service implementation.
Ensure it can be easy for the application developers in order to consume the services.
It can also enable the customer / user to change the backend service of the implementation without having an effect on the public API.
It also enables the user / customer inorder to take the advantage of the monetization, analytics, developer portal, and some other edge features.
Rather than having the application developers one can easily consume your services directly, they can also access the API proxy that is created on the Edge. The functions of the API proxy are as a mapping of the available HTTP endpoint in order to your backend of the service. By creating the API proxy the customer lets the Edge handle the authorization and security tasks that are needed to protect the services of yours, as well as to monitor, analyze, and monetize the services as well.
Because of the application developers one can make HTTP requests to the API proxy, but without directly to the services, developers are not required to know anything about the services implementation. All of the the developer required to know is:
API URL proxy endpoint.
Any of the query headers, parameters, or the body parameters can be passed in a request.
Any of the required authorization and authentication credentials.
The response format includes the response information / data format, such as JSON or XML.
The API proxy can also isolate the application developer from the backend service. Therefore one must have to be free in order to change the service implementation as the public API gets consistent.
For example, the customer can change the database implementation and move his / her services to the new host, or can make other changes to the service implementation. By having such a consistent frontend API, the existing client applications will continue to work regardless of backend changes.
The customer can use the API proxy policies in order to add the functionality to the services without the need to make the changes to the service which is on the backend. For example, the customer / user can add the policies to the proxy in order to perform data transformations and filtering, add security, execute conditional logic or custom code, and other actions as well. The most important thing to remember is the customer implements policies on the Edge but not on the backend server.
Conclusion:
Hope this article helps you understand the Apigee Edge fundamentals. Still, you have any queries, feel free to comment in the below section. Happy Learning!