Creating Scalable APIs with Google Cloud API Gateway and Apigee
- Ashish Tiwari
- Oct 20, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 2
In today's digital landscape, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have become the backbone of modern applications, enabling seamless communication between different services and applications. Whether you’re building microservices, mobile backends, or IoT solutions, a scalable API architecture is essential to ensure high performance and reliability.
Google Cloud offers two powerful solutions to help you build and manage scalable APIs: Google Cloud API Gateway and Apigee. While both tools are designed for API management, they serve different needs. This blog will guide you through the key differences, use cases, and step-by-step instructions for creating scalable APIs using these two services.
Why Choose Google Cloud API Gateway or Apigee?
Choosing the right API management tool depends on your use case. Here’s a quick comparison of both:
Google Cloud API Gateway:
● Best for simple, lightweight APIs with low complexity.
● It acts as a gateway to services like Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, and Compute Engine.
● Provides security features like authentication and authorization, as well as monitoring and traffic management.
● Cost-effective and ideal for smaller projects.
Apigee:
● Enterprise-level API management platform with more advanced features like analytics, monetization, rate limiting, and API versioning.
● Designed for managing complex, large-scale API ecosystems.
● Offers rich developer tools, like API documentation, developer portals, and lifecycle management.
● Ideal for companies needing to manage internal and external APIs at scale.
Step-by-Step Guide: Building Scalable APIs with Google Cloud API Gateway
Let's start by setting up an API using Google Cloud API Gateway. This is a cost-effective, easy-to-configure solution for building lightweight and scalable APIs.
Step 1: Create and Deploy an API Backend
Before setting up the API Gateway, you need an API backend, which could be hosted on Google Cloud services such as Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, or Compute Engine.
For this guide, we will create a basic HTTP service using Cloud Functions.
Create a Cloud Function:
○ Go to the Google Cloud Console and navigate to Cloud Functions.
○ Click on Create Function and give it a name, e.g., hello-world-api.
○ Set the trigger to HTTP and choose Allow unauthenticated invocations (for simplicity).
○ Write a simple function that returns a greeting message in your preferred language (e.g., Python, Node.js).
Example:def hello_world(request):
return "Hello, World!", 200
Deploy the Function:
○ After setting up the function, click Deploy. Once the deployment is complete, you’ll receive an HTTP URL that you can use to invoke the function.
Step 2: Set Up the API Gateway
Enable API Gateway:
○ In your Google Cloud Console, go to APIs & Services > Library.
○ Search for API Gateway and click Enable.
Create an API Config:
○ Navigate to API Gateway and select "Create API."
○ Provide a name for your API, then click Next.
○ Create an API Config file in YAML format that defines the API’s backend services and routes.
Example API Config (openapi.yaml):openapi: 3.0.0
info:
title: Hello World API
version: 1.0.0
paths:
/hello:
get:
x-google-backend:
'200':
description: A successful response
Deploy the API:
Once you’ve created the openapi.yaml file, deploy the API via API Gateway. This can be accomplished using the gcloud command-line tool:
gcloud api-gateway api-configs create hello-config \
--api=hello-api --openapi-spec=openapi.yaml \
--project=PROJECT_ID
Create an API Gateway:
○ In the Google Cloud Console, navigate to API Gateway and create a gateway by associating it with the API you just configured.
○ Select the region and deploy the API to the gateway.
Step 3: Secure and Monitor Your API
Authentication:
Google Cloud API Gateway supports multiple authentication methods, such as Google Cloud IAM and JWT tokens. To enable authentication, update your openapi.yaml file to include authentication policies.
Example:
securityDefinitions:
google_id_token:
authorizationUrl: ""
flow: "implicit"
type: "oauth2"
x-google-issuer: "https://accounts.google.com"
x-google-jwks_uri: "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/certs"
x-google-audiences: "YOUR_BACKEND_URL"
security:
- google_id_token: []
Monitoring and Logging: Use Google Cloud Monitoring and Logging to gain insights into your API’s performance. API Gateway automatically generates logs and metrics, which you can access through Cloud Monitoring dashboards.
Example: Set up uptime checks to monitor the availability of your API, and create alerting policies to get notified when errors occur.
This diagram shows how Google Cloud API Gateway sits between clients and backends like Cloud Functions, Compute Engine, or Cloud Run, enabling authentication, traffic management, and monitoring.
Building Enterprise-Grade APIs with Apigee
For more complex use cases that involve managing multiple APIs or exposing APIs to external developers, Apigee is the better choice.
Step 1: Create and Deploy an API on Apigee
Enable Apigee:
In your Google Cloud Console, enable Apigee API and create an Apigee Organization.
Set up a new environment (e.g., test or prod) where your API proxies will run.
2. Create an API Proxy:
In the Apigee Console, navigate to APIs > API Proxies.
Click Create Proxy and select Reverse Proxy as the type. This proxy acts as a layer between clients and backend services.
Configure the proxy to route traffic to your backend API (e.g., the Cloud Function created earlier).
3. Add API Policies: Apigee allows you to add policies to handle traffic management, rate limiting, OAuth 2.0 authentication, and more. For instance, you can create a policy to limit the number of API requests made by a client in a given timeframe.Example:
<Quota async="false" continueOnError="false" enabled="true" name="RateLimit">
<DisplayName>RateLimit</DisplayName>
<Allow count="1000" countRef="request.header.X-App-Key" />
<Interval>1</Interval>
<TimeUnit>minute</TimeUnit>
</Quota>
4. Deploy the Proxy: Once your API proxy is configured, deploy it to your Apigee environment (test or production).
Step 2: Monitoring and Analytics
Apigee provides detailed analytics for your API usage. You can view insights on API traffic, performance, and errors.
Enable Analytics: In the Apigee Console, go to Analytics > Dashboards to see detailed information on request latencies, response codes, and traffic patterns.
Real-World Case: Rate Limiting on Apigee
Consider a scenario where you have an e-commerce platform with thousands of external developers consuming your APIs. You want to prevent any single developer from consuming too many resources, impacting the performance for others. With Apigee’s rate-limiting policies, you can limit each developer to 1000 API calls per minute, ensuring fair usage.
Choosing Between API Gateway and Apigee
The decision to choose API Gateway or Apigee depends largely on the complexity of your API ecosystem:
● Use API Gateway if you’re looking for a lightweight, cost-effective solution for simple APIs.
● Choose Apigee if you need advanced API management features, such as developer portals, API versioning, and rate limiting for a complex, scalable API infrastructure.
Building Scalable APIs with Google Cloud
Both Google Cloud API Gateway and Apigee offer powerful tools to create, secure, and scale your APIs. By following the step-by-step instructions in this guide, you can build APIs that not only meet your current needs but also scale with your growing application and user base.
Whether you’re managing a few APIs or a large API ecosystem, Google Cloud has the tools you need to achieve high performance and security.
Disclaimer
The information provided in this blog is intended for educational purposes only. API Gateway and Apigee features are subject to updates and changes by Google Cloud. Please refer to the latest official documentation for accurate configuration details.
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