What is our primary use case?
I'm a part of a service provider company, and we basically provide all kinds of services for our customers. One of the areas for which we provide services is API management. We work a lot with Apigee, and we have experience and a good team working with Apigee.
In terms of use cases, we've created a good marketplace for one of the clients. They are a logistics company, and they have a lot of vendors and partners with whom they work. So, we have created a marketplace where the vendor's partners can integrate for their shipments and other things. They can integrate their applications into this marketplace.
We have also implemented developer portals where we do the onboarding of developers. They can create their code SDKs, etc.
Currently, we are at a customer site, and we are migrating the on-premise version H to Apigee X, which is the latest one.
What is most valuable?
The analytics function and the developer portal are the two valuable features of Apigee. The analytics part is very good, and the developer portal is quite rich in features.
The authentication mechanisms are quite easily built into Apigee, which is something that most of the other products have also now started supporting.
What needs improvement?
iPaaS is something that we would like to see. For example, MuleSoft is kind of an integrated platform as a service (iPaaS), and it provides a lot of out-of-the-box connectors and other such things. This is where Apigee lacks. I'm not sure if that's the roadmap for Apigee, but any improvements on those lines would be helpful where things become easier to implement.
For how long have I used the solution?
It has been four to five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is definitely stable. Performance-wise, we have not seen any major bottlenecks. What we have realized is that the performance is not just because of the tool itself. If you take any API management tool, the performance also depends on the way the integrations are done. So, if implemented correctly, performance is not really an issue.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With the SaaS model, scalability is there.
It is suitable for large companies because it is a bit pricey. It is definitely not for small companies, but it might be suitable for medium companies.
How are customer service and support?
We have not been in touch with them much because we mostly have done development, but they do provide good support. Their support during the initial design architecture phase is also very good. So, if you have bought the licenses, they do provide an architect to come in and define the whole architecture. That way, the support is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We work on multiple API management tools based on the requirement of a particular customer. We have worked on Apigee, Dotcom, MuleSoft, to name a few.
How was the initial setup?
Managing an on-premise setup themselves can be a huge overhead for customers. Apigee, I believe, releases patches very frequently, and those upgrades and maintenance activities are quite an overhead. Having said that, it has good support. They provide a lot of scripts through which the installation and other things can be automated, but obviously, we have to tailor those to our needs. On-premise is definitely a little bit of overhead. We have to have a team to manage that, but now with Apigee X going on SaaS, most of the implementations are on SaaS. So, this overhead is minimized a lot, and you just have to do the configurations.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is a bit on the expensive side. Its licensing cost is a bit high, and that's where we've seen people going back on their decisions.
What other advice do I have?
In the latest version of Apigee, they've broadened the support for socket communication, which was previously missing in Apigee Hybrid.
I wouldn't recommend Apigee for simple situations because sometimes, it does become an overhead. It is overkill for simple situations. If you have very complex scenarios where you are trying to embark on a cloud journey and you still have systems on-premise or some systems are hosted on some other cloud and you want to do an integration, Apigee is really good. It provides support for the mesh architecture, and with that, it becomes quite easy.
The advice that we normally give is that when you are starting on an Apigee journey, you should not think of it just as an API management tool. We try to give it as an enterprise API platform that a large customer with different lines and businesses, such as a bank, would eventually leverage as a whole. You should not treat it in a way where only a particular group is using Apigee. It is an enterprise platform. So, you should treat it as a platform.
I would rate Apigee an eight out of 10.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner