Functionality Provided By Apigee

Following is a simple concise summary (which i like!!) on what Apigee provides by my colleague Michael Bissell on stack overflow.

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http://stackoverflow.com/a/22901404

Where to put functionality in the flow is usually contextual but there are a few easy things to put in every proxy:

1) Key Management: Using Apigee to manage your API keys and mint your access tokens gives you a couple things; first line of defense for unauthorized apps and automatic analytics about what the developer is doing (getting a high error rate from one app? reach out to them and help them solve their problem proactively).

2) Basic Security Policies: Once you know the App is allowed to access your API there are some simple security policies that should be run on the Apigee layer. Payload enforcement (JSON and XML threat protection, regular expressions to block things like SQL injection or other invasive code). You can also set quotas based on the API Key (different developers getting different levels of access based on the products you associate with their keys). You also want to set spike arrests to keep your API traffic from overwhelming your target server.

3) Response Management: Make sure you strip out unnecessary response headers (cookies, server versions, etc) that aren't relevant to the API Contract. No need to tell your app developers about your target architecture, but it's sometimes hard to suppress those headers from application servers. You may also want rules to block unexpected responses from the target server (500 errors that may contain stack traces for example).

4) Caching: The ability to cache responses in Apigee drives a lot of the rest of "where to do it" questions. But being able to return a Cached response from Apigee can decrease your latency by hundreds of milliseconds improving your transactions per second and your developer/consumer satisfaction. The question now becomes how fine-grained you can get your cached response without having to go to the target server.

Beyond that it becomes "Where is it easiest and most efficient to do a task?" Things like JSON to XML, for example, are easy in Apigee, but they're easy in other platforms that may be running on your backend server, too.

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Clean-up old revisions of API proxies from Apigee Org

The revisions of proxies tend to grow, specifically in an Apigee org used as development environment. Cleaning old un-deployed revisions not only de-clutters the UI but also eliminates unnecessary storage. At times speeds up deployment process too.

Following is a simple perl script I use to automatically clean up un-deployed versions of the proxy. The perl script use the resty command line client to clean up the revisions it found in the org.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use JSON;
use Data::Dumper;

my @proxies=("apiproxy1","apiproxy2", "apiproxy3","apiproxy4");

$\ = "\n";
$user="username";
$passwd="password";

foreach my $p (@proxies) {
 print "Processing proxy: $p";
 my $res=`curl -s https://api.enterprise.apigee.com/v1/o/<orgname>/apis/$p -u $user:$passwd`;

 my $json=decode_json $res;
 my @revs=@{$json->{'revision'}};
 foreach my $rev (@revs) {
  print `curl -s -X DELETE https://api.enterprise.apigee.com/v1/o/<orgname>/apis/$p/revisions/$rev -u $user:$passwd`;
 }
}