Pivotal’s cloud platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, now supports additional Apigee API management tooling focussed on hybrid (i.e. part public/part private) cloud support. While Apigee’s hybrid cloud management software, Edge Microgateway, was released last year, Cloud Foundry users can now utilize it within the Pivotal platform’s Apigee plugin.
Ed Anuff, senior vice president of Apigee product strategy, and Carlos Eberhart from Apigee presales spoke at the SpringOne Platform conference on August 2nd to discuss route management in a hybrid cloud environment and the problems companies can face exposing internal API’s to public consumer environments. Key points they touched on are issues that can arise with latency and security. There can be several hops of indirection between an inside service and its outside consumers, and lack of centralized configuration can lead to holes in security or compliance when it comes to managing the connection between one inside and several other outside applications.
Microgateway is a Node.js application created by Apigee, that provides a suite of services for API producers worried about traffic management, quota enforcement, content caching, and the like. Anuff begins his presentation at SpringOne Platform with a wish that this functionality could all be built into an API upon development without forcing “the application developer to sort of explicitly think about all those things when they were building the application.” Microgateway creates a one-to-one mapping between an API and consumer application to provide a standard suite of included services and a centralized location to configure these services such that, for example, spike arrest and different security policies are properly enforced without needing any additional manual development work.
The collaboration between Apigee and Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry software began in May when Apigee’s API management software, Apigee Edge, became available as a sponsored partner service on the Pivotal Network marketplace. Eberhart commented in the SpringOne Platform presentation as to why the partnership is a good fit for Apigee:
Digital is an overused word but there’s two sides to a route that really need to happen. There’s kind of the sharing and consumption side and the producing side and we think that Pivotal and Cloud Foundry really have the producing side down flat and we think we’ve got the sharing side down flat.
While Eberhart does speak to Apigee wanting to build in an increasing number of API consumer software services, for now the focus, he says, is on producer management.
Apigee and Pivotal have separately also nodded to the growth of microservices when mentioning their partnership. Both Cloud Foundry and Microgateway are directed at teams wanting a self-service approach to establishing platform tooling and software. In a world where teams may be creating hundreds of autonomous micro-apps, manually building all the software infrastructure around aspects almost all applications will rely on, APIs and a cloud platform, can be time consuming. As the popularity of microservices grows, there’s added pressure on finding tooling that supports this desired agility. Apigee writes in their press release that their collaboration with Pivotal is in part a response to that complexity and scale.
