Apigee terminology

This page applies to Apigee and Apigee hybrid.

View Apigee Edge documentation.

This page explains some basic Apigee terminology. For additional terms, see the Glossary.

Term	Definition
analytics region	The physical location where analytics data is hosted when data residency is disabled.
API consumer data region	A single-region location that Apigee uses for service infrastructure when the control plane location is multi-region. Some Google Cloud services can run only in a single region. If Apigee relies on any of these services, Apigee needs to know in which region these services should be running. This field is relevant only when the control plane location selected during provisioning is multi-region.
API proxy	An API proxy is an interface between incoming requests and backend services. The proxy executes policies to process all incoming requests and outgoing responses from the backend.
control plane	In Apigee, the control plane is part of the infrastructure of configuration of API proxy/environments and underlying infrastructures used to support Apigee functions(like analytics, etc.). The control plane supervises and directs the behavior of the data plane and other Apigee functions.
control plane data	Any customer data handled directly or indirectly by the control plane. Control plane data is analytics data, API proxies, target servers, truststores and keystores and anything else shared across runtimes.
control plane location	The physical location in which control plane data is stored.
data residency	Data residency for Apigee meets compliance and regulatory requirements by allowing you to specify the geographic locations (regions) where Apigee customer/PII data is stored and processed.
deploy	You deploy an API proxy to an environment to make it accessible to clients on the internet, either publicly or privately, depending on your network configuration.
encryption key	Encryption is used to protect data from being stolen, changed, or compromised and works by scrambling data into a secret code that can only be unlocked with a unique digital key. You can use a Google-managed, or customer-managed encryption key.
environment	An Apigee environment is an isolated software execution context, within an organization, where you deploy API proxies. An environment can scale to meet the demands of the proxies deployed there. You can create multiple environments in an organization.
environment group	An environment group is a group of Apigee environments with one or more hostnames. The hostname is part of the URL used to call API proxies deployed to any environment in the environment group.
Google Cloud projects	Google Cloud projects enable you to create and use Google Cloud services, including managing APIs, enabling billing, adding and removing collaborators, and managing permissions for Google Cloud resources. You need to create a Google Cloud project before you can create and provision an Apigee organization.
organization	An Apigee organization is a container for everything related to Apigee in your Google Cloud project, including API proxies, services, and the resources needed to support them. You create your organization during provisioning. Note: An Apigee organization is not the same as a Google Cloud organization.
policy	A policy is a processing step that is executed by an API proxy. Apigee provides many pre-defined policies that perform various API tasks, such as transforming message formats or enforcing access control.
provisioning	Provisioning is the process for installing and configuring Apigee.
proxy endpoint	A proxy endpoint defines the way your API proxy interacts with client applications. You configure the proxy endpoint with a basepath that is part of the URL that your API proxy responds to. The URL has the form https://hostname/basepath/pathsuffixes. See Create an API Proxy.
region	A specific geographical location where you can host your resources.
runtime database	The internal database where runtime data is stored. Runtime data is the data related to your API requests; data in the database, oauth tokens, API keys, etc.
runtime disk	The disk used by GKE nodes where runtime data is stored.
runtime instance	A runtime instance is a deployment of the Apigee software. You create an instance during provisioning, and can later add more instances. Instances correspond to Google Cloud regions, and there can only be one runtime instance per Cloud region.
runtime plane	In Apigee, the runtime plane is part of the infrastructure for API creation, security, management, and operations. All API traffic passes through and is processed within the runtime plane.
target endpoint	A target endpoint defines the way your API proxy interacts with your backend services. You configure the target endpoint to forward requests to the appropriate backend service, and to define security settings, HTTP or HTTPS protocols, and other connection settings. See Changing the target endpoint.