Conquering Hybrid API Management: Building The Perfect Team and Platform
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Introduction
In our discussions with technology leaders from around the world for – The Digital Crunch Time: 2022 State of APIs and Applications – two themes emerged
#1 Cloud — and hybrid cloud specifically — is becoming a driving factor of success with 59% of respondents saying they were looking to increase their hybrid cloud adoption within the next 12 months.
#2 82% of organizations with a mature API strategy and higher API adoption reported increased efficiency, collaboration, and agility.
It’s clear that hybrid cloud – usually a combination of on-premise infrastructure (or private cloud) and a public cloud computing environment (like Google Cloud) – and APIs are becoming popular keys to success. The challenge now becomes – how to structure your teams and architect your platform to manage APIs at scale in hybrid environments?
In this two-part series, we’ll look at how successful organizations are managing APIs on a large scale across hybrid environments using Apigee. In this post we’ll look at how to structure the right team and set up the platform to help you thrive. In part 2 of this series, we will explore how to operate the platform with optimum clusters, scaling, and automation.
Why is it difficult to manage APIs at scale in hybrid environments?
As your business grows, it makes sense that you will need to scale and build more APIs to keep pace. This can mean thousands of APIs with tens of thousands of transactions per second. And these APIs are often operated across completely different business units with many development teams. Like with any large scale operation, building a central governance across these hundreds of APIs is extremely challenging.
Operating APIs in a hybrid environment offers a number of benefits — less latency, compliance with regulations etc., — but to get the most out of them, you need a clinical and pragmatic approach to solving the two challenges outlined below.
#1 How to structure your API teams?
One of the most successful patterns when structuring your API teams is a Center for Enablement team. This team is made up of many federated API producer teams throughout the enterprise with one central team of deep subject matter experts. This central team builds out the guardrails for the API program, develops reusable content, helps automate things like the CI/CD pipeline, and delivers best practices.
Note that the level of implementation handled by the centralized team may vary. For example, they may have a full CI/CD pipeline to maintain, or they may simply provide templates for the federated dev teams to build their own pipeline. However implementation is coordinated, having this structure ensures a consistent API model with appropriate governance and security in place across the enterprise.
Another successful strategy is to reduce the size or redefine the role of the central teams over time. For example, one of our customers recently adopted a model where their largest business units are fully responsible for operating their own infrastructure using a GitOps model. In this case, the centralized team created the automation for installing and upgrading Apigee hybrid, but the business units themselves operated their own copy of the platform, allowing them complete autonomy. In this way, gradually increasing the autonomy for the federated teams will help avoid delivery bottlenecks while ensuring consistent governance.
You can visualize this change over time pretty easily using the following diagram.
#2 How to architect your platform?
Another challenge is designing your Apigee organizations (top-level container that contains all your API proxies and related resources) and environments (software environment for creating and deploying API proxies). To tackle this, you first need to understand the relationship between different entities within an Apigee organization. Apigee organization is the top level entity – nothing shared between Apigee organizations. Using an organization in Apigee, customers can segregate resources and manage access to these resources based on their own requirements. In practice, this means that each Apigee organization has its own apps, API keys, developers, proxies, and so on. The diagram below provides a visual representation of how different entities in an Apigee organization interact with each other.
Another key factor to consider is the technical limits of the platform – designing around these limits leads to higher platform performance and stability.
In the design phase, it is vital to articulate fundamental requirements of your architecture and agree on these baseline principles with all the stakeholders involved. Some of these fundamental questions include:
- How many regions need to host runtimes?
- Host runtime instances for organizations that handle production traffic in at least 2 regions to meet aggressive uptime SLAs. During upgrades, ensure only one of these regions upgrades at a time.
- What are the steps in your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and how does Apigee fit into it?
- Use Apigee organizations as the SDLC perimeter — such as a dev organization and a test organization — to give yourself the capacity for a large number of proxies. It is also common that the dev organization in this model has relatively permissive access for developers, allowing them to work more efficiently.
- What level of access or separation do you need between business units or development teams?
- Create separation between different teams by leveraging environments with conditional identity and access management to restrict access as necessary
- If your team is very large and you plan to have multiple organizations, you may want to divide the operational ownership for these different Apigee organizations among different teams in your enterprise while keeping them operating under the centralized team.
- In such a shared responsibility model, the largest consumers of the system stand up and operate their own instances. Teams with many APIs or distinct operational needs can use the automation from the central team to stand up and operate their own Apigee hybrid clusters. This reduces the burden on the centralized team while allowing business units to be self-sufficient and ensuring that the clusters are optimized to meet that team’s needs.
- For very large scale programs where additional separation is necessary, consider creating separate organizations for each business unit, each of which has the full complement of SDLC orgs. Some customers have this level of scale, and often it makes logical sense to divide up into different Apigee orgs because it’s rare that 5000 APIs are all related and used together.
By working off these baseline recommendations, you will come up with your own logical design of Apigee organizations and environments. Using Apigee organizations to represent your SDLC with business units — or functional areas or some other dividing mechanism — is a good way to design different environments.
For large scale deployments — involving thousands of proxies — we recommend dividing organizations into different logical business units while still following the SDLC model. In many cases, only the largest business units will need their own organizations, and it is possible to have a shared organization that contains multiple business units.
Conclusion
Like with any large scale IT project, there isn’t one“correct” way to operate APIs in a hybrid cloud environment. Finding the right approach for your enterprise starts with knowing the organizational requirements and tailoring Apigee for your use case. In the next installment of this series, we will explore how to operate Apigee with the optimal resources (clusters, automation, and monitoring etc.) for a large scale hybrid API program.
Check out our documentation to learn more or start using Apigee hybrid.
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A Guide to Anthos: the App Modernization Platform for Hybrid and Multi-cloud Deployments
Anthos gives you a consistent platform for all your application deployments, both legacy as well as cloud native, while offering a service-centric view of all your environments.
You can build enterprise-grade containerized applications faster with managed Kubernetes on cloud and on-premises environments. Create a fast, scalable software delivery pipeline with cloud-native tooling and guidance.
It also helps leverage a programmatic, outcome-focused approach to managing policies for apps across environments, and enable greater awareness and control with a unified view of your services’ health and performance.
Tune in to this brief explainer video for an overview of Anthos, deployment examples, and explore options to get started illustrated through a demo with Bradley Wong, Product Manager at Google Cloud. Learn to make the best first step in your journey of application modernization and gain a clear understanding of the value of Anthos for your hybrid and multi-cloud workloads.
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Telstra Leverages APIs To Accelerate Digital Transformation
Telstra is Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, offering a full range of communication services and competing in all telecommunications markets.
In Australia, it provides 17.7 million retail mobile services, 4.9 million retail fixed voice services and 3.6 million retail fixed broadband services.
But owing to legacy infrastructure the company was unable to boost business efficiency and agility. To address these challenges, the company decided to leverage the Apigee platform.
“One of the key challenges that Apigee helped us solve was ensuring greater efficiency. Efficiency in business is absolutely critical. The more efficient you become the quicker you can solve problems and hence lower costs of solving those problems,” says David Freeman, General Manager of API enablement, Telstra.
Freeman also highlights that the Apigee platform has helped Telstra reduce the cycle time of delivery from months to days and sometimes even minutes. It also empowered the organization to efficiently track their developer community as well.
“Apigee was not only able to take systems and services and turn them into APIs but it also provided an analytics capability where we could keep an eye on the developer community, we could see what the developers were doing with APIs. On top of that, it also provided a great way to monetize APIs. This ensures that our developers can quickly and easily consume APIs,” says Freeman.
Watch this short video and get greater insights into how Apigee is helping Telstra accelerate digital transformation.
What to Look for from Cloud CISO Perspective
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May is a big month for the security industry. It’s been over a year since we gathered for RSA in San Francisco for one of 2020’s last major in-person events. While we likely won’t be together in person this year, it’s an important time for the security community to come together and reflect on many accomplishments, and to consider the challenges still ahead of us. As the world focuses on security incidents and all the risks that still need resolving, it is important to stand back, on occasion, and also note that immense progress has been made by large numbers of small, medium and large enterprises to protect themselves and their customers against increased threats. What is also amazing is to see organizations do this while accelerating their digital transformations, supporting and protecting customers and managing ongoing remote working challenges. We are privileged to play our part in supporting those great teams.
It’s also been a busy month for us here at Google Cloud since our inaugural CISO perspectives blog post in April. Today, I’ll recap our cloud security and industry highlights, a sneak peak of what’s ahead from Google at RSA and more.
Thoughts from around the industry
- Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud – In our latest Office of the CISO whitepaper, we shared guidance on both the challenges and opportunities of cloud transformation for Chief Risk Officers, Chief Compliance Officers, Heads of Internal Audit and their teams. A misconception we sometimes see among these executives is that moving to the cloud creates more risk to manage. Having held these leadership positions in previous roles, I believe that the cloud is as much a means of managing security, resilience and other risks as it is a risk in its own right. The whitepaper dives deep into considerations for each of these leadership functions as their organization embarks on a digital transformation journey.
- The importance of meeting global compliance requirements – Compliance is critical for building trust with customers in regulated industries, especially the public sector. It is worth remembering that in any critical industry, where there can be material impact from incidents, strong industry practices and standards to protect customers are vital (I wrote about this last summer). At Google Cloud, we’re regularly adding new compliance and security certifications to meet our customers’ needs globally. Recently, we expanded our list of FedRAMP High-certified products to include Cloud DNS, and helped our customers in the Asia-Pacific region address various compliance requirements to meet new government regulations for security and data protections. Google Cloud was also the only cloud service provider to complete an annual pooled audit with the Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG), which is a syndicate of 39 leading European financial institutions and insurance companies who depend on cloud infrastructure and technologies to deliver innovative solutions and experiences for their customers. Having spent most of my career in the financial services industry, I know firsthand the importance of managing risk assessments for outsourced vendors to provide the necessary assurances customers need from their cloud providers.
RSA 2021
We have a great lineup of speaking sessions and keynotes from Googlers at RSA this year. Below are the highlights you don’t want to miss:
- I’ll be doing a session on May 20 about supply chain resilience, where a panel of experts will dive into how we can adjust risk and security initiatives to handle the next “punch to the supply chain.” Additionally, on May 18 I’ll join many of my esteemed CISO leaders from various industries and governments for a keynote discussion on our top security insights, lessons learned and best practices for how we move forward as an industry to address the next wave of challenges.
- Google’s Senior Director of Information Security Heather Adkins will deliver a session on how to build secure and reliable systems at scale, which will cover principles from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book with the same title (available for free download here). I’m most looking forward to Heather’s advice for how we as an industry can reshape our security thinking, based on modern architectures and technologies that can help organizations design scalable and reliable systems that are fundamentally secure.
- Nelly Porter, Senior Product Manager at Google Cloud Security, will participate in a panel discussion with security experts on the importance of Confidential Computing technology, how it’s changing the security landscape and where it’s headed. Google Cloud has made great progress in delivering a Confidential Computing portfolio for our customers in regulated industries over the past year, and we’re excited for new milestones in 2021.
Google cloud security highlights
- Infrastructure and SRE spotlight – Before I joined Google Cloud, I always admired the infrastructure and benefits this organization delivers that are uniquely Google – from the subsea cable innovations to SRE inventions and principles. Security and resiliency are baked into every layer of our infrastructure. Many of the Googlers who build and support our platform have sat in the same seat as our customers, so they understand those needs intimately. Over the last few months it’s been amazing to watch our technical infrastructure team grow, and the direct reliability, operational resilience and security benefits that team brings to our customers. For example, we’ve opened a new region in Poland, announced the first subsea cable that will directly connect the U.S. to Singapore with fiber pairs over an express route, and released an SRE book focused on how organizations can complete a successful cloud migration.
- New security foundations blueprint guide – As part of our mission to deliver the industry’s most trusted cloud, we strive to operate in a shared-fate model for risk management in conjunction with our customers. This includes sharing opinionated step-by-step guidance with key decision points and focus areas for how our customers deploy workloads in Google Cloud. This is why we’ve updated our Google Cloud security foundations guide and corresponding Terraform blueprint scripts. These blueprints are tremendously helpful to many stakeholders within an enterprise, like a CISO that needs to understand our key principles for cloud security, or a C-Suite business leader that needs to quickly identify the skills their teams need to meet an organization’s security, risk, and compliance needs on Google Cloud.
When we think about the types of features to build into products, we have many principles we follow. But the two that I keep coming back to as crucial are:
- The need for secure products not just security products. All products should have security built in and while we do build great security products our security and other teams remain focused on constantly enhancing the base levels of security and the security features in all our products.
- Defense in Depth. We don’t just focus on defense in depth from attacks – for ourselves and our customers. We also prioritize defense in depth from configuration errors or other hazards.
As you see below in some of the highlights of new features and products, these represent our commitment to secure products and all forms of defense in depth.
- Workload identity federation – Service account keys are powerful credentials, and can represent a security risk if they are not managed correctly. A safer approach is to use workload identity federation, using IAM to grant external identities IAM roles, including the ability to impersonate service accounts. This lets you access resources directly and eliminates the maintenance and security burden associated with service account keys. We also offered related overall guidance on the best way to use and authenticate service accounts on Google Cloud.
- VPC-SC Directional Policies – With VPC Service Controls (VPC-SC), admins can define a security perimeter around Google-managed services to control communication to and between those services. Using VPC-SC, you can isolate your production GCP resources from unauthorized VPC networks or the internet. But what if you need to transfer data between isolated environments that you’ve set up? VPC-SC directional policies is a new secure data exchange feature that allows you to configure efficient, private, and secure data exchange between isolated environments.
- Anthos service mesh supports VMs as well as clusters – Most enterprise compute resources are still in VMs and many will remain there for a long time to come. In Anthos 1.7, your VM-based workloads can now take advantage of the same mesh functionality as your container-based workloads.
- Cloud Spanner CMEK and Access Approvals – Cloud Spanner is Google Cloud’s fully managed relational database that offers unlimited scale, high performance, strong consistency across regions and high availability. Spanner now supports customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and Access Approval, Google Cloud’s industry-leading controls to require approval before access to your content by Google support and engineering teams.
- External Key Manager enhancements – In early 2020 we launched Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM), the industry’s leading Hold-Your-Own-Key (HYOK) product. Using Cloud EKM, the keys used to protect your data stored and processed in Google Cloud are completely hosted and managed outside of Google Cloud infrastructure. Cloud EKM initially launched with support for BigQuery and GCE/PD; we expanded support for Cloud SQL, GKE, Dataflow Shuffle, and Secret Manager, with CMEK support currently in beta. We also provided in-depth documentation on the functionality, architecture and use cases for Cloud EKM in a new whitepaper.
- Web App and API Protection solution – Web applications and public APIs are increasingly important to how organizations interface with their customers and partners, and we’ve seen increased investment in tools to protect these resources from fraud and abuse. Google Cloud’s new Web App and API protection solution is based on the same technology Google uses to protect its public-facing services against web application exploits, DDoS attacks, fraudulent bot activity, and API targeted threats. It provides protection across clouds and on-premises environments.
- Threat Intel for Chronicle – Most threat intelligence feeds require security teams to do the implementation and legwork. With our new Threat Intel for Chronicle offering, however, our intelligence insights are applied automatically across your security telemetry to present unique observations within your environment. Threat Intel for Chronicle is exclusively curated for enterprise customers by Uppercase, Google Cloud’s intelligence research and applications team to provide our perspective on threats across the internet and surface them as relevant alerts.
That wraps up another month of thoughts and highlights. If you’d like to have this Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox, click here to sign-up, and we’ll see you in June!
Business Evolution with API Ecosystems
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During uncertain times, ecosystem partnerships that leverage APIs have proven to help companies scale and address gaps in their businesses. Apigee customers, like CHAMP Cargosystems, have pursued API-first ecosystem models to enter adjacent markets, create new customer interaction models, and rapidly grow their brand reach and partner ecosystems. As a result of building their API ecosystem, they are transacting 300 million electronic exchanges and 20 million shipments per year.
CHAMP selected Apigee to provide an API platform and developer self-service portal option to all of its SaaS customers. Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and portal allows CHAMP and its customers to quickly connect to a variety of backend systems, including in-house, third party apps, marketplace portals and more– thereby accelerating their digitization strategies and opening up new markets through an API ecosystem.
Join this webcast and hear from this leading Enterprise company on how to:
- Identify new revenue sources and markets using an API management platform
- Improve time to market while still complying with all industry requirements
- How to create a proof of concept to grow API adoption throughout your organization
- Align internal business leaders and partners to see the importance of an API-first platform vision
Google Extends Support for Windows Server Containers on Anthos for Faster App Modernization and Consistent Dev Experience
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Today, many applications in organizations’ data centers run on Windows Server. Modernizing these traditional Windows apps onto Kubernetes promises a host of benefits: a consistent platform across environments, better portability, scalability, availability, simplified management and speed of deployment, just to name a few. But how? Rewriting traditional .NET applications to run on Linux with .NET Core can be challenging and time-consuming. There is, however, a lower-toil, more developer friendly option.
Last year, we announced support for Windows Server containers running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), our cloud-based managed Kubernetes service, which lets you take the advantage of containers without porting your apps to .NET core or rewriting them for Linux. Today, we’re going a step further with support for Windows Server containers on Anthos clusters on VMware in your on-premises environment. Now available in preview, you can consolidate all your Windows operations across on-prem and Google Cloud.
Bringing Windows Server support to our family of Kubernetes-based services—GKE running on Google Cloud, and Anthos everywhere—with the same experience, lets you modernize apps faster and achieve a consistent development and deployment experience across hybrid and cloud environments. Further, by running Windows and Linux workloads side by side, you get operational consistency and efficiency—no need to have multiple teams specializing in different tooling or platforms to manage different workloads. The single-pane-of-glass view and the ability to manage policies from a central control plane simplifies the management experience, while bin packing multiple Windows applications drives better resource utilization, leading to infrastructure and license savings.
With all these benefits, it’s no surprise that customers such as Thales, a French multinational firm specializing in aerospace and security services, have been able to reap significant benefits by moving Windows applications to GKE.
“We moved our Windows applications from VMs to Windows containers on GKE and now have a unified mechanism for Linux and Windows-based application management, scaling, logging, and monitoring. Earlier, setting up these applications in VMs and configuring them for high availability used to take up to a week, and the applications were not easily scalable,” said Najam Siddiqui, Solutions Architect at Thales. “Now with GKE, the setup takes only a few minutes. GKE’s automatic scaling and built-in resiliency features make scaling and high-availability setup seamless. Also, manually maintaining the VMs and applying security patches used to be tedious, which is now handled by GKE.”
Let’s take a deeper look at the architecture that lets you run your Windows container-based workloads on-prem.
Windows Server running on-prem with Anthos
The diagram below illustrates the high-level architecture of running Windows container-based workloads in an on-prem GKE cluster with Anthos. Windows server node-pools can be added to an existing or new Anthos cluster. Kubelet and Kube-proxy run natively on Windows nodes, allowing you to run mixed Windows and Linux containers in the same cluster. The admin cluster and the user cluster control plane continue to be Linux-based, providing you a consistent orchestration experience and management ease across Windows and Linux workloads.
Get started today
When considering modernizing your on-prem Windows estate, we recommend running Windows Server containers on Anthos in your own data center. If you are new to Anthos, the Anthos getting started page and the Coursera course on Architecting Hybrid Cloud with Anthos are good places to start. You can also find detailed documentation on our website, and our partners are eager to help you with any questions related to the published solutions, as is the GCP sales team. And as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at anthos-onprem-windows@google.com if you have any feedback or need help unblocking your use case.
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