Mirror mirror on the wall,
What do I do with my API sprawl,
Where can I see them all,
How to make sure they listen to my call,
And to ensure their compliance doesn’t fall.
API hub is the one to rule them all!
Are you a platform administrator struggling to get a complete visibility of your APIs?
Are you looking to identify and ensure your APIs are adhering to compliance standards?
Are you trying to categorize and make sense of your API sprawl?
Do you attempt to identify which of your APIs are associated with different gateways and what lifecycle stage or ownership distribution of them?
Are your developers struggling to find the right APIs from 100s of APIs spanning across different gateways ?
Do you want to track dependencies and avoid down time when dependent APIs are deprecated or undeployed ?
If you are interested in solving any of these problems, read on!
The goal of API hub is to provide a single location to manage, observe, and govern all APIs in an organization, regardless of which API gateway or API producer that an organization is using. API hub has been in GA since September’2024 and is available to use at no cost.
This blog talks about some of the basic features of API hub (and supplements product documentation and the existing blog), and things that can already be accomplished with the product.
API hub is API-first, which means that all functionalities in the API hub are built using APIs (pun intended). So each of API hub functionalities can be automated & integrated with your organization’s CI/CD pipelines using API hub APIs. API hub capabilities are consumed using Google Cloud Console UI as well.
Today, you can already achieve the following with the API hub (detailed blog posts upcoming for some of these topics) -
- You can add, edit and manage a complete catalog of all your APIs along with their associated entities - starting with API metadata, versions of APIs, linking version to API specifications, along with surfacing the operations in the specification, and the ability to link an API to a particular deployment endpoint.
- You can add attributes to your set of APIs and tag them with various Lifecycle stages, Compliances that you wish to track and more. Not only that, you can add your own attributes on an API entity and track, manage and filter those using the API hub.
- You can automatically import and link your Apigee proxies in the API hub. You easily import API proxies from multiple GCP projects by just associating those projects to API hub - no other configuration required. API hub imports proxy and api endpoints details and allows the users to search on those. The Apigee proxy in the Runtime project will continue to be the source of truth and API hub will periodically poll to ensure that the API definitions are in sync.
- You can drive compliance for your API specification files using Lint scores. API hub provides out-of-the-box Linting using open-source Spectral Linter and lints any REST-based API specification file that is ingested into the Hub. You can choose to use a different style guide other than the default one and update the same using APIs. If you wish to use a different linter to track your API quality, you can do the same and update the Lint scores in the Hub using the Update Specification API.
- Imagine you wish to fetch a particular API details but don’t remember the exact API signature or even name or partial name . We introduced semantic search in API hub powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI search which allows you to search over all your API entities - and return the best match based on the semantic equivalent of the request.
- You can track the API Supply Chain for your APIs in the Hub by modeling dependencies between various API operations. These can also be visually represented using a graph. E.g. you can model an Orders API dependent on an Inventory API which can be tracked as a dependency. Should there be a change in your Inventory API, you can flag the need for change in Orders API.
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API hub introduced the Plugin framework - the one stop shop to allow you to ingest data / build value-add services on top of that data in API hub. You can leverage the Plugin framework to bring in more data or interact with data in API hub.
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API hub also introduced the Collect and Curate framework for bringing in data from your data source - this allows for advanced workflows where you can enrich, filter, slice & dice, or modify your data before it is pushed to Hub. As part of the same, we also introduced the concept of API fingerprinting, which allows you to uniquely identify your data source along with the flexibility to choose how to uniquely identify and represent an API.
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API hub also provides an out-of-the-box insights view for your APIs to be able to easily get a quick view of your API landscape.
- API hub is a GA feature from Apigee, which means it comes with standard compliances like VPC-SC support, support for IAM, IAM conditions and Tags etc, which allow for enterprise users to be able to confidently use API hub in their user journeys and entrench them as part of your critical workflows.
Apigee API hub is an Apigee feature available for all the Apigee customers with no cost; and we welcome you all to try out the product, give feedback and most importantly - join us in the journey to untangle the API maze.
Authors
- Arun Ramamurthi
- Hari Sharma
- Senthil Doraiswamy
- Eugene Jude