Google Cloud Endpoints now generally available: a fast, scalable API gateway
Dan Ciruli
Product Manager
Today we're excited to announce general availability and full support for Google Cloud Endpoints, a truly distributed API gateway. It features a server-local proxy (the Extensible Service Proxy) and is built on the same services that Google uses to power its own APIs. For developers building applications and microservices on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Cloud Endpoints is the best-suited modern API gateway that helps secure and monitor their APIs.
APIs are a critical part of mobile apps, modern web applications and microservices. With the increased focus on APIs comes increased responsibility: the top features you need to take care of your API are authorization, monitoring and logging. In other words, “Help make my API safer” and “Tell me how my API is doing.” And, above all: “Help make sure it is highly performant!”
Cloud Endpoints helps you with all of that. Through integrations with Firebase and Auth0, Cloud Endpoints authenticates each call to your API — so you know who's using your mobile and web apps. Cloud Endpoints also validates service-to-service calls, helping to keep your microservices more secure.
You can create API keys via the Google Cloud Console, just like we do for APIs such as the Google Translation API and the Google Maps APIs. It logs API calls to Stackdriver Logging and displays a monitoring dashboard in the console, giving you critical status information about the health and performance of your API.
Cloud Endpoints is tightly integrated with the GCP ecosystem and is easy to use especially when running containerized workloads. The API proxy is built into Google App Engine flexible environment and can be added to any Kubernetes or Google Container Engine deployment with a couple of lines of YAML. Deployment occurs through gcloud, and the monitoring and logging is all in Cloud Console. The proxy functionality is also built into the Endpoints API Frameworks (see below) for use on App Engine standard environment.
Cloud Endpoints is ideal for GCP customers who need a fast, scalable API gateway. Enterprise customers can also take advantage of Apigee Edge, an industry leading API management platform that we acquired this fall, for full-featured API management that works across on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployment models.
Endpoints has been in beta for three months and our early adopters are already doing amazing things with it. We’ve seen people going from initial evaluation to production in days, and scalability has been terrific: one customer’s API peaked at over 11,000 requests per second, and another customer served nearly 50 million requests in a day.
When migrating our workloads to Google Cloud Platform, we needed to securely communicate between multiple data centres. Traditional methods like firewalls and ad hoc authentication were unsustainable, quickly leading to a jumbled mess of ACLs. Endpoints, on the other hand, gives us a standardised authentication system, backed by Google's security pedigree.
— Laurie Clark-Michalek, Infrastructure Engineer at Qubit
Frameworks
For developers working on App Engine standard environment, we're also announcing general availability and full support for our Java and Python frameworks. The Endpoints Frameworks are available to help developers quickly get started serving an API from App Engine. Think of the Endpoints Frameworks as lightweight alternatives to Python Flask or Java Jersey. The Endpoints Frameworks come with built-in integration to the Google Service Control API, meaning that back-ends built with the Endpoints Frameworks do not need to run behind the Extensible Service Proxy.Pricing
We want everyone to be able to benefit from Cloud Endpoints, so we created a free tier so that your first two million API calls per month are available at no charge. Once your service is popular enough to go beyond the free-tier, the pricing is a simple $3.00 per million requests.The Endpoints Frameworks can optionally expose all of the features of the Cloud Endpoints API gateway. The Endpoints Frameworks can be used at no cost, but the Endpoints API gateway features turned on with the Frameworks (API keys, monitoring and logging) are charged at the standard rate.
Go ahead, read the documentation, try our walkthroughs for App Engine (standard or flexible environment), Container Engine or Compute Engine and join our Google Cloud Endpoints Google Group. To hear more about Google’s vision on comprehensive API technologies for enterprise customers and developers, including more about Apigee Edge, please join us next month at Google Cloud Next '17 in San Francisco.
