Announcing MongoDB connector for Apigee Integration

MongoDB is a developer friendly application data platform that makes it easy for developers to access a wide variety of data using a unified language interface, simplifying the data handling process. MongoDB Atlas , MongoDB's fully managed cloud database, enhances MongoDB’s capabilities even further with full-text search and real-time analytics, as well as event-driven and mobile experiences.

Google Cloud’s Apigee is an industry-leading, full lifecycle API management platform that provides businesses control over and visibility into the APIs that connect applications and data across the enterprise and across clouds. 

MongoDB and Apigee have already partnered to provide a solution to ease and secure access to siloed data for internal developers or partners. Today, we are further simplifying this solution by announcing a new connector between Apigee and MongoDB. 

How is it simpler?

It can be complex to connect data and applications. Developers need to create and maintain custom transactional code between cloud apps to create the connection between the data source and application:

• This code is often the first one to break

• It is not cost effective as it is not reusable.

Last year, Google Cloud announced Apigee Integration, a solution that helps enterprises easily connect their existing data and applications and surface them as accessible APIs that can power new experiences, expand digital ecosystems and protect access to critical assets. 

Apigee provides a secure facade between the frontend application and data source to speed up the development process using standard interfaces and a simplified developer experience.

Apigee Integration now includes an out-of-the-box MongoDB connector. With this connector, developers can perform CRUD operations on a MongoDB database. 

The need for setting up the programming modules and exposing  them using the RESTful interface is eliminated. The connection to MongoDB Atlas can be set up directly using the Apigee UI with support for advanced MongoDB connection settings.

As the connector is part of Apigee Integration it also provides the ability to transform the data using the transformation engine from Google Cloud.You can easily design your transformation logic using a drag-and-drop interface, manage variables in different formats (Json, String, Arrays..) and conditional flows. 

A concrete example

A Healthcare company needs to share datasets with external partners. They chose MongoDB Atlas as it is fully managed and for its dynamic schema that is ideal for building modern applications. Their partners can only consume the data through an API. For security reasons, they will not be able to access the database directly.

Fig.1 shows how simple it is to implement a “plug and play” approach for this scenario, with built in security at the edge of Google Cloud to prevent attacks using Cloud Armor and Apigee as well as providing fine grained governance for the partners.

Fig.2 shows how easily the MongoDB connector can be deployed in the Integration designer, without maintaining any infrastructure. The business logic, like sensitive data approval, can be added to the connector, before the data is returned to the partner.  

In this example :

1. The flow is triggered by an API call exposed by Apigee

2. The MongoDB connector retrieves the data 

3. If the DataClass retrieved is A, an approval will be requested on the UI.

4. If the DataClass retrieved is B, only the necessary fields will be sent back to the consumer using the filtering capabilities.

Developers Save Time in a Secure Environment

With this new integration between Apigee and MongoDB Atlas, developers now have a simpler experience for accessing relevant data.Instead of wasting time building transactional code, they can focus on implementing business scenarios in a secure and scalable environment.

Next Steps

1. Introduction to Apigee X.

2. Learn more about MongoDB Atlas.

3. Learn about Apigee connectors.

4. Learn how to set up an Apigee MongoDB connector.

5. Extend your data to new uses with MongoDB and Apigee - blog.

^{We thank the many Google Cloud and MongoDB team members who contributed to this collaboration.}