Integrating Apigee With DevOps: Best Practices for API Management

Today's organisations increasingly rely on APIs to create meaningful connections between services, enhance customer experiences, and deliver consistent value. But managing these APIs effectively can be a complex task. This is where platforms like Apigee API Management come into play. By integrating Apigee into our DevOps pipeline, we've simplified workflows, strengthened security, and improved efficiency.

In this blog, we want to share our journey—how we successfully integrated Apigee, the challenges we faced along the way, and the rewards that followed. 

Benefits of Integration

Integrating Google Cloud Apigee API Management into our DevOps pipeline has provided many benefits, particularly in security, consistency, and control. Deployments are executed using an "Apigee Organization Admin" service account, ensuring only authorized changes are made. Credentials are securely stored in Bitbucket, making the pipeline the exclusive method for proxy deployment. This controlled process minimizes risks and ensures a high level of security.

By combining Apigee API Management with DevOps practices, we align API management with agile workflows, allowing us to:

• Automate API Deployment: Deploy and update APIs faster, with fewer manual errors.

• Monitor Continuously: Track and analyze API performance as part of our CI/CD pipeline.

• Maintain Consistency: Ensure policies, security measures, and versions are consistent across environments.

Learn more about how an API platform can fit into your business strategy.

Our DevOps Stack

Our DevOps pipeline relies on two pivotal tools for managing project provisioning and proxy codes: Terraform and Git Bitbucket.

• Terraform constructs the infrastructure of our Apigee environment, including creating instances, configuring load balancers, and managing service accounts. These components are vital for a robust and scalable framework, streamlining deployment and enforcing consistent security.

• Git Bitbucket serves as the central repository for proxy and configuration deployments. It orchestrates proxy deployments through custom pipelines, ensuring consistency, automation, and efficient management of configurations like target servers and key-value maps (KVMs). Together, Terraform and Bitbucket form the backbone of our DevOps stack.

Automation in Deployment

Our CI/CD pipeline integrates with Apigee API Management to automate proxy deployment and portal updates. For example, when an API endpoint is modified, the pipeline automatically updates the OpenAPI specification in our portal, ensuring up-to-date documentation without manual intervention. This automation improves efficiency and ensures accurate API details.

We also leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles by managing Apigee configurations using tools like Terraform. Defining API proxy deployments in code enables us to version control our configurations, replicate environments for testing or production, and easily roll back changes if necessary. This approach is critical for maintaining agility and resilience at scale.

Centralized Configuration and Proactive Monitoring

Integrating Apigee into our DevOps process posed a few challenges, particularly in setting up a scalable project structure and testing with a local emulator. To address these challenges, we utilized specific Maven plugins: the Apigee Deploy Maven Plugin for proxy deployment and the Apigee Config Maven Plugin for configuration deployment. These tools helped streamline the local development process and integrate more smoothly with our DevOps stack.

We also used Apigee Management APIs to automate tasks such as creating API proxies, updating policies, and configuring settings. These APIs enabled automated deployments and consistent policy management, supporting our need for scalability and rapid iteration.

Challenges and Solutions

A major benefit of integrating Apigee with our DevOps pipeline has been the ability to centralize and automate configuration management. By maintaining framework-specific configurations within a Maven project, we efficiently propagated proxies across various environments, ensuring consistency and speeding up deployments. This approach reduced manual effort, minimized configuration errors, and allowed us to meet tight deployment schedules.

We also integrated monitoring tools like Prometheus and Apigee's built-in analytics to gain visibility into API response times, error rates, and traffic volumes. These metrics were used to maintain a rapid feedback loop, ensuring that issues were identified and resolved before affecting end users.

Tips for Tech Leaders

• Region Selection: To minimize latency and comply with regulations, choose regions for Apigee X instances based on performance and data residency requirements.

• Domain Configuration: Ensure your domain or subdomain is prepared, with an "A record" pointing to the appropriate load balancer IP. Proper domain setup is crucial for seamless routing of API traffic.

• Automate as Much as Possible: Automate proxy deployments, security checks, and portal updates to enhance consistency, improve efficiency, and reduce the potential for human error.

• Adopt GitOps: Use Git as the single source of truth for all API configurations. Leveraging GitOps workflows for deployment will help maintain traceability and transparency in your processes.

• Test Early and Continuously: Test API proxies, policies, and functionalities to identify issues early. This practice will help maintain high standards and reduce the risk of problems in production.

By addressing these considerations early on, developers can create a well-designed framework that integrates smoothly into their DevOps pipelines, boosting their enterprise systems' overall performance, security, and reliability.

We have found that integrating API management with a DevOps approach supports our architecture and enables efficient microservices handling. Apigee acts as a powerful platform that simplifies API management while ensuring security and scalability for developers. This is particularly beneficial in a microservices-based architecture where managing multiple APIs becomes crucial.