Apigee (previous CloudAve coverage), the API infrastructure company formerly known as Sonoa Systems, today highlighted momentum in their business and announced a new service called API Delivery Network (API-DN), which can be simplistically defined as CDN equivalent for APIs. In January of this year, I pointed out to Apigee processing 16 Billion API calls per month and argued that APIs are getting more and more important in the increasingly cloudy world. In fact, today at Gluecon John Musser of Programmable Web pointed to how open APIs are doubling every nine months now with the rate of increase accelerating with every single day. Today Apigee came back and announced that they are processing 40 Billion API calls every month. This not just highlights the trend we are seeing regarding the proliferation of APIs but also highlights the momentum Apigee is seeing in today’s world. However, the interesting announcement coming from Apigee today is Apigee API Delivery Network.
The Problem
As we move further into the cloud and big data based world, the importance of APIs for delivering the services and data becomes critical. However, as many in the cloud community had highlighted many times in the past, the internet infrastructure hasn’t scaled with the cloud and data. This clearly affects the delivery of application services and data to the end users. On the other side, we are seeing an increasing number of devices being used from increasingly different parts of the world highlighting the drawbacks in today’s infrastructure. How do service providers of all sizes and shapes offer a more optimized end user experience on all these devices? Especially, with more and more enterprises adopting social, mobile and cloud, there is some level of urgency to innovate. Waiting for the infrastructure to evolve is not an option. We need technological solutions to work around the infrastructure “speed bumps” and give a more optimized user experience.
Apigee Solution
Today’s announcement by Apigee is a solution aimed towards solving this problem. In the web 1.0 era, we saw the emergence of CDNs to help static websites offer better user experience by taking the content closer to the user. With more dynamic data and proliferation of APIs, there is a clear need for a CDN equivalent for APIs. Simplistically speaking, this is what Apigee’s API-DN does for enterprise users. It is an add-on to Apigee Enterprise and it can be easily deployed within 2 weeks. API-DN offers the following advantages for enterprise customers:
- Increase API response time by 10X
- Improve API reliability and consistency by increasing the infrastructure availability to 99.99%
- Better scalability at a much lower cost
The Backend Story
API-DN hosts the customer APIs on different Amazon EC2 regions around the world, while also providing intelligent caching and optimization for faster load time and offloading processing intensive functions such as API authentication, traffic management and transformations. It can be hosted and managed on demand or deployed on premise.
Conclusion
The enterprise move towards cloud is a reality and PaaS is going to be the future of Cloud Services. In such a world, APIs are key and a solution like API-DN will go a long way in ensuring a consistent and seamless user experience. This is going to be more important as more and more enterprises are increasingly exposing their APIs openly.
Related articles
- Apigee Opens Up API Console To All (cloudave.com)
- Whats Next for APIs? (kinlane.com)
- Offering an API? Create Your Own Console With Apigee’s Free API Tool (mashable.com)
- Apigee-to-Go: Extending the Console Metaphor and the Concept of the Social Object (readwriteweb.com)
