Google Apigee API HUB One API Catalog to rule them all

“A universal API catalogue that brings all your API information together in one place”

Bert Meuris
10 Mar 2024

Introduction

Lots of our customers today use API Gateways from multiple vendors, often running on multiple clouds or hosting multiple API gateways on-premises.  The huge growth of APIs, leads to an unmanageable sprawl of APIs. One of the first questions we ask when we meet new customers is the number of APIs they are running. And surprisingly, the answer to that question is for most of them not so easy to give.

As the number of APIs skyrockets, gaining a comprehensive view of all the APIs across an organization becomes increasingly difficult. This lack of visibility can lead to redundancy and the risk of duplicating existing APIs.

Additionally, governance and lifecycle management pose significant challenges. Ensuring consistent quality across all APIs is critical, especially for driving adoption. It is essential that each API adheres to established naming conventions and best practices, and that there is a clear process for managing APIs, from their inception to eventual deprecation.

Google Apigee API Hub

Fifteen years ago, during the height of the SOA era, there was a strong emphasis on service contract design and SOA governance. We introduced SOA Catalogs to make service contracts visible and easily discoverable across the organization, allowing us to add documentation, manage contract versions, and more. When the API wave came, we missed all these great governance features of our SOA catalogs, often leading to (duplicated) APIs created in various silos within the company.

Now, with the introduction of Google Apigee API Hub, these challenges belong to the past.

Google Apigee API Hub provides us exactly with this centralized, consolidated view for managing, cataloging, and governing APIs. It is part of the Apigee API Management platform, which provides a range of tools to develop, secure, and analyze APIs.

The key functions of Apigee API Hub are:

  • Organize and manage your APIs and its metadata in one unified place, no matter what the underlying protocol is, or gateway technology or cloud it is deployed in.
  • Discover your APIs using powerful searching capabilities based on AI using natural language.

  • Associate API specifications like OpenAPI definitions with an API version, extract its metadata, like API operations, deployment endpoint etc…
  • All popular API styles are supported (REST, gRPC, SOAP, AsyncAPI and GraphQL)
  • It maintains a powerful taxonomy scheme and you can add your own, custom attributes like for example the API owner, business unit, maturity level, data classification, operational team responsible for keeping the API live, etc..

  • Register APIs via the Apigee API Hub API or manual using the user interface regardless on which API Gateway technology these APIs are running.
  • If your APIs are running in Google Apigee, these APIs can be automatically fetched and registered. Google Apigee API Hub must have access to the Google GCP project which contains your Apigee instance to make this work.
  • Lint API specifications according to company guidelines. You can define your own linting rules in Spectral and upload them to the API Hub. Linting is automatically triggered when uploading an API specification.

  • Manage dependencies between APIs and between APIs and their artifacts
  • Publish changes to Google EventArc enabling event-based integrations

Conclusion

The Apigee API Hub is a valuable tool that can be used by all personas involved in the API lifecycle and will help each of us in making better decisions.

For API designers and analysts, it simplifies the creation of new APIs, promoting reuse by preventing duplication and ensuring consistency through adherence to naming conventions and design guidelines. For API consumers, it streamlines the adoption process by offering easy access to relevant APIs. Additionally, API Product Owners benefit from a centralized, comprehensive view of their API portfolio, with a powerful taxonomy that facilitates API lifecycle management by indicating in which lifecycle state an API is in.

This unified place where we can manage all our APIs and its metadata helps us with API lifecycle management, increased visibility and consistency and thus drives adoption.

We see Apigee API hub as the missing link, as the natural evolution of our SOA Governance tooling, enabling API governance in our API programs.

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