Cloud Endpoints: Introducing a new way to manage API configuration rollout
Simon Zeltser
Developer Programs Engineer
Google Cloud Endpoints is a distributed API gateway that you can use to develop, deploy, protect and monitor APIs that you expose. Cloud Endpoints is built on the same services that Google uses to power its own APIs, and you can now configure it to use a new managed rollout strategy that automatically uses the latest service configuration, without having to re-deploy or restart it.
Cloud Endpoints uses the distributed Extensible Service Proxy (ESP) to serve APIs with low latency and high performance. ESP is a service proxy based on NGINX, so you can be confident that it can scale to handle simultaneous requests to your API. ESP runs in its own Docker container for better isolation and scalability and is distributed in the Google Container Registry and Docker registry. You can run ESP on Google App Engine flexible, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, open-source Kubernetes, or an on-premises server running Linux or Mac OS.
Introducing rollout_strategy: managed
APIs are a critical part of using cloud services, and Cloud Endpoints provides a convenient way to take care of API management tasks such as authorization, monitoring and rate limiting. With Cloud Endpoints, you can describe the surface of the API using an OpenAPI specification or a gRPC service configuration file. To manage your API with ESP and Cloud Endpoints, deploy your OpenAPI specification or gRPC service configuration file using the brand new command:This command generates a configuration ID. Previously, in order for ESP to apply a new configuration, you had to restart ESP with the generated configuration ID of the last API configuration deployment. If your service was deployed to the App Engine flexible environment, you had to re-deploy your service every time you deployed changes to the API configuration, even if there were no changes to the source code.
Cloud Endpoint’s new rollout_strategy: managed option configures ESP to use the latest deployed service configuration. When you specify this option, ESP detects the change to a new service configuration within one minute, and automatically begins using it. We recommend that you specify this option instead of a specific configuration ID for ESP to use.
With the new managed rollout deployment strategy, Cloud Endpoints becomes an increasingly frictionless API management solution that doesn’t require you to re-deploy your services or restart ESP on every API configuration change.
For information on deploying ESP with this new option, see the documentation for your API implementation:
