Delivering high-performing global APIs with Apigee X and Cloud CDN

Organizations are increasingly investing in digital businesses ecosystem strategies to foster innovation and operate efficiently. These ecosystems connect various stakeholders–such as partners, developers, and customers–via application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs allow various software systems to interface, and are thus the primary mechanism of value exchange within these ecosystems.

For example, Bank BRI, one of the largest banks in Indonesia, drove over $50 million in new revenue by creating an online marketplace with more than 50 monetized open APIs that let over 70 ecosystem partners leverage the bank’s credit scoring, business assessment, and risk management capabilities. Similarly, AccuWeather, the world’s leading weather media and big data company, makes APIs available to more than 70,000 registered developers who’ve used the company’s data and functionality to create over 30,000 apps.

Scaling up digital business ecosystems can unlock new markets, grow regional partnerships, and connect distributed workforces–but all of this starts with scaling up the API program. To help customers globally scale API programs, we are pleased to bring the power of Google’s networking capabilities to API management.

Expand global reach and deliver high performance with Apigee and Cloud CDN

Apigee X, the latest release of Google Cloud’s full lifecycle API management platform, makes it simple and easy to apply Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) to APIs. Working in tandem, the two solutions let enterprises not only secure and manage their APIs but also make them available across a global ecosystem of stakeholders.

Specifically, Apigee lets enterprises apply security to APIs, control how and by whom they’re used, publish them for consumption, monitor and analyze their usage, monetize them, and perform other aspects of API product management. Cloud CDN helps these APIs and the services they support to be performant, regardless of how many ecosystem participants are calling the API or where those ecosystem participants are located.

Cloud CDN runs on Google Cloud’s globally-distributed edge network and lets organizations serve content globally. This reduces latency both by leveraging Google’s massive network infrastructure, which supports services such as Gmail and Google Search, and by caching content closer to the users, improving performance and availability for peak traffic seasons. Because digital assets can be served from Google’s global edge instead of an organization’s backend systems, web pages and apps can run even faster and offer a smoother experience.

By caching often-accessed data at the network edge, as close to the customers and end users, as quickly as possible, Cloud CDN also helps organizations seamlessly handle seasonal spikes in traffic, such as those that may occur during the holiday or back-to-school seasons. In addition to improving ecosystem experiences and reliability, this approach to caching can also minimize web server load, compute usage, and ultimately costs.

Better digital experiences lead to bigger digital ecosystems

Whether it’s interacting with customers, partners, or third-party developers, an enterprise’s ability to expand its digital ecosystem is limited by the quality of the digital experiences it creates. If apps load too slowly or services are not consistently available, ecosystem participants will leave. If APIs and the apps they power are not secure, participants will leave. Each link in the digital ecosystem value chain relies on API management and network management to keep interactions flowing–and with the combined power of Apigee X and Cloud CDN, we’re pleased to help our customers meet these challenges and expand their businesses. To try Apigee X for free, click here, and to learn more about Cloud CDN, click here. Check out our latest demo of Apigee and Cloud CDN working together in the below video.