API Management

API Management for Microservices

December 7, 2017

Prithpal Bhogill

Group Product Manager

Apigee Microgateway for Pivotal Cloud Foundry is now in public beta

We’re excited to announce the public beta of Apigee Microgateway for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a new model for deploying a microgateway inside Cloud Foundry apps to provide integrated API management for microservices.

Service broker

This new feature is delivered as service broker tile and deployed as a service inside of Cloud Foundry. It ships a new microgateway decorator buildpack, which leverages the meta buildpack through which the microservices API runtime (Apigee Microgateway) can be injected into the app container as a sidecar proxy (Learn more about buildpacks here).

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Apigee Microgateway

Apigee Microgateway is a lightweight, secure, HTTP-based message processor designed especially for microservices. It processes requests and responses to and from backend services securely while asynchronously pushing valuable API execution data to Apigee Edge, where it’s consumed by the analytics system. The microgateway provides vital functions, including traffic management (protection from spikes in traffic and usage quota enforcement, for example), security (OAuth and API key validation) and API analytics.

Microgateway decorator buildpack

A meta buildpack is a Cloud Foundry buildpack that enables decomposition and reordering (execution order) of buildpacks. Using this approach, the provided microgateway decorator buildpack gets inserted inside the app container during the app build process and “decorates” or frontends all calls made to the underlying app or API.

Container sidecar

The light footprint deployment model of the Apigee Microgateway makes it easy for it to be coresident within apps and microservices developed in Cloud Foundry as a container sidecar.

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The coresident model provides the following general benefits and features:

No routing overhead Apigee Microgateway is embedded into the app container, so this option is great for apps that have low latency requirements.
Simplified lifecycle management and automatic scaling As Apigee Microgateway is part of the app container, it participates in the app lifecycle process and scales up automatically as the app is scaled.
Consistent and pervasive protection to service implementations All ingress to the service runs through Apigee Microgateway.
Analytics across all API exposures Consolidated analytics is valuable across all internal and external consumption patterns. Apigee Microgateway provides a lightweight mechanism for capturing analytics for all use cases.
Consistent access to APIs Common infrastructure is leveraged for API keys, tokens, and API product definitions.
Self service Internal and external API consumers are served through a single developer portal.

That’s all great, but we wanted to make it even simpler for Cloud Foundry app developers to start using this new feature. So we built a series of Cloud Foundry CLI plugins. These make pushing, binding, and unbinding the Apigee Service Broker more streamlined and easier to use.

The new capabilities eliminate the friction for app developers and makes it easy to enable API management for their microservices, so they can be secured, managed, and the relevant stakeholders get out-of-the-box, end-to-end visibility.

It’s easy to get started: