But you told me about security! Is there a concierge?
Spot on! You want to expose your services, however, you don’t want to touch that old service!
The thing is, the service doesn’t have authentication! No problem! Just keep your service internal, and Apigee will handle the authentication and only pass on the valid requests to the legacy application. That way, no changes are needed at the great backend that no one wants to touch.
That sounds great!
But now, since the applications are being more used, how can I ensure they are not over loading?
Actually, Apigee X can also help you with that in two ways, proactive or passive.
In other words, another great benefit that you get by using an API Management tool, is that you are concentrating all of your traffic on a single place. Due to that, you can easily monitor all the requests performed to your application park, since all the traffic is routed on Apigee.
Just imagine that you work as a security guard on a security checkpoint.
You can see all the people passing by your gate and you can collect metrics related to that. And just like a security guard on a security gate with cars and car spaces, you can define, on Apigee, that you only want to take, for example, 1000 requests per second.
That’s called quotas and you can easily map that on API level or even on a client level.
Amazing! But aren’t we just sweeping the dust under the carpet?
How can I start cleaning my environment and organizing better my system?
Well, one of the greatest advantages of having your services oriented as APIs is that you have documentation about it (at least, most of the times).
It is more or less standard, among the developers, to use Swagger or OpenAPI specs, however, it is unusual to have a single place where you can find all of that documentation.
Unfortunately, it is very common to find silos of Swaggers among Teams or Departments and that’s not very friendly to share with other colleagues or even partners. But not anymore. With Apigee X you can create multiple Developer Portals where you can hold all of your information exposed on Apigee.
You can set up a central portal, to hold all of your APIs, where all of your
developers can find all the information on how to use those APIs and you can, for example, create another one to share with your partner.
This is highly recommendable and we advise you to encourage this from the beginning.
To keep all the API contracts updated, you should have as much automation as you can to reduce the human interaction, just as we did!
You want to know more? Give us a shout!
Article by Diogo N. Teixeira (AppMod Specialist @ Ten Twenty One)
