Hello Apigee Team & Community,
I have been working with Apigee for more than 5 years across different
environments and use cases, including both Apigee On-Prem and
Apigee X (Cloud). Based on this experience, I would like to share
some feedback specifically related to developer experience and
usability during API proxy development.
From a development and troubleshooting perspective,
Apigee On-Prem offers clearer visibility and stronger control
over API flow execution compared to Apigee X.
Apigee On-Prem – Developer Experience:
- Unified and clear visualization of proxy flows.
- Easier understanding of policy execution order.
- Better visibility into how requests and responses move through the proxy.
- Faster debugging and troubleshooting, especially for complex proxies.
- Reduced cognitive load during development.
Apigee X – Observed Challenges:
- Flow visualization feels more fragmented.
- Harder to quickly understand the full execution path of a request.
- Requires more navigation and context switching to inspect policy behavior.
- Reduced visibility impacts developer productivity when working on
complex logic such as security, authorization, or transformations.
This feedback is focused purely on usability and developer productivity,
not on infrastructure, scalability, or managed-service benefits.
Apigee X is powerful from a platform perspective,
but the current UI/UX makes flow understanding and debugging more difficult
compared to the On-Prem experience.
Suggestions for Improvement:
- Provide a unified execution-path view for selected flows.
- Improve visual representation of policy order and conditions.
- Introduce a flow-centric debugging or visualization mode.
Enhancing these areas would significantly improve the
day-to-day development experience and ease migration from On-Prem to Apigee X.
I would be interested to hear if others in the community share
similar observations or have best practices to overcome these challenges.
Thank you.