This page applies to Apigee and Apigee hybrid.
View Apigee Edge documentation.
The following concepts are common ideas that have a unique meaning in Apigee.
A
- API base path and resources
- An API is made up of a base path and a set of resources (also known as resource paths). For each API, you define a single root URL (also called the base path and multiple resource paths. You can think of an API simply as a set of URIs, all of which share a common base path. To make it easier to manage your APIs, Apigee augments these raw URIs with display names and descriptions.
- API consumer
- Synonymous with app developer, who uses the APIs created by an API provider.
- API developer
- A software engineer in an API provider organization who builds APIs. Those APIs are used by app developers (API consumers) to build apps.
- API product
- A collection of API resources (URIs) combined with a service plan and presented to developers as a bundle. The API product can also include some metadata specific to your business for monitoring or analytics. One or more resources can be monetized by including them in an API product, which can then be bundled into an API package for monetization.
- API provider
- An API provider builds APIs (using Apigee) for API consumers (app developers) to use.
- API proxy
- A proxy that acts as a facade for your existing API. Rather than calling your existing API, developers begin calling the new API generated by Apigee. This facade decouples your public interface from your backend API, shielding developers from backend changes, while enabling you to innovate at the edge without impacting your internal development teams. As you make backend changes, developers continue to call the same API uninterrupted. In more advanced scenarios, Apigee lets you expose multiple interfaces to the same API, freeing you to customize the signature of an API to meet the needs of various developer niches simultaneously.
- Apigee APIs
- The endpoints that you can use to configure environments, organizations, API proxies, and other hybrid services.
- app developer
- App developers register their apps with an API provider, which is how app developers get the API keys they need to call the provider's API proxies.
- apps
- Your developers use apps to access the resources in your API products. When you create an app, you select the API product to include, and Apigee generates a key. Each app has a single key that provides access to multiple API products. Apps allow you to control who can access your resources. You can control who has access to your API products by revoking and refreshing an app's key. And you can control access to bundles of resources by revoking or deleting access to the products in an app.
B
- balance details
- For a prepaid developer, the balance in the developer's account.
C
- Cassandra
(Apigee hybrid only) The runtime data repository that stores application configurations, distributed quota counters, API keys, and OAuth tokens for applications running on the gateway.
This is a resource intensive StatefulSet and should be on a separate worker node from the Message Processor.
For more information, see About the runtime plane.
- central management infrastructure (or plane)
- See management plane.
- container[ized] image
- See image.
- control plane
- See management plane.
D
- deploy
In Apigee, you deploy an API proxy to an environment to make it accessible to application clients on the internet, either publicly or privately, depending on your network configuration.
- developer
- A developer refers to a role that an Apigee user could perform. There are two types of developers in Apigee:
- API Proxy developers - create the API proxies and apply policies.
- Application developers - create applications that consume API Proxies.
- developer category rate plan
- A rate plan that applies to all developers in a specific category and is available for purchase by all developers in that category.
- developer rate plan
- A rate plan that applies to a specific developer and is available for purchase only by that developer.
E
- environment
An Apigee environment is an isolated software environment, within an organization, where you deploy API proxies. The environment can scale to meet the demands of the proxies deployed there. You can create multiple environments in an organization.
- environment group
An environment group is a group of Apigee environments with one or more hostnames. The hostname is part of the URL used to call API proxies deployed to any environment in the environment group.
- explicit limit
- See custom limit.
G
- GCR
- Google Container Repository.
- GKE
- Google Kubernetes Engine. A Google-managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications into Kubernetes. GKE allows you to get up and running with Kubernetes in no time, by completely eliminating the need to install, manage, and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.
I
- image repository
- A group of shared container images.
- implicit limit
- A limit (such as a developer prepaid balance limit) set by monetization.
- Ingress/Ingress controller
- A containerized app that routes traffic from outside the cluster to services within the cluster.
K
- KMS
- Key Management Service. Stores, maintains, and presents keys and OAuth tokens for encrypting and decrypting traffic. The Apigee KMS manages keys for apps, developers, and API products.
- KVM
- Key Value Map. A custom collection of key/value string pairs that is either encrypted or unencrypted. For more information, see Using key value maps.
- Kubernetes administration machine
- Your local machine that you use to run commands against your Kubernetes cluster. This machine is typically a desktop machine that has access to your Kubernetes VMs.
M
- management plane
- The Google-hosted central services that communicate with the runtime plane through service accounts.
- MART
The API for runtime data interacts with the local runtime datastore (Cassandra). It serves as the API provider for public Apigee API to access and manage runtime data.
MART is a stateless application just like Message Processors. It is a Kubernetes containerized app.
For more information, see About the runtime plane.
- master node
- A Kubernetes term for a node that includes the apiserver, cloud-controller-manager (CCM), scheduler, and kube-controller-manager.
- Message Processor
(Apigee hybrid only) The Message Processor evaluates an incoming request, executes any Apigee policies, and calls the back-end systems and other systems to retrieve data. Once those responses have been received, the Message Processor formats a response and returns it to the client.
The MP is a Kubernetes Deployment. It is configured for a single Apigee environment, pointing to a scoped subdirectory within the shared filesystem to which the Synchronizer provides data.
An MP is resource intensive and should be on a separate worker node from Cassandra.
For more information, see About the runtime plane.
- monetization
- A component of the Apigee that provides an easy-to-use and flexible way of monetizing API products.
- monthly amount used
- A developer's total usage for a given month, which includes setup fee + transaction fee + recurring fee.
- monthly payments
- The recurring payments made by a developer based on the plans purchased. Rate plans can have a recurring fee that is charged to a developer every month regardless of usage.
N
- namespace
- Virtual clusters used to divide cluster resources. Namespaces are for larger clusters with many users; smaller clusters with only tens of users do not typically need namespaces.
O
- open adjustment
- An adjustment that has not yet been applied in published billing documents.
- open billing month
- A complete calendar month for which final billing documents have not been published.
- open source Kubernetes
- The reference implementation of Kubernetes. See Kubernetes. Apigee hybrid runtime runs on open source Kubernetes and open-source based versions of Kubernetes that are CNCF conformant.
- organization
A container for all the entities in an Apigee account, including API proxies, API products, API packages, apps, and developers. This document uses the terms Apigee organization or hybrid-enabled organization interchangeably.
To install and use Apigee or Apigee hybrid, you must have an Apigee organization that is bound to a Google Cloud project. You do this when you create the organization in a process known as provisioning.
An Apigee organization is not the same as a Google Cloud organization. Where the possibility of ambiguity exists, this document should specify that the organization is an Apigee organization.
For more information, see Organization types.
P
- pod
- A pod is the basic building block of Kubernetes: the smallest and simplest unit in the Kubernetes object model that you create or deploy. A pod represents a running process on your cluster.
- prepaid balance
- An amount of money available for a prepaid developer to pay in advance for API packages.
- prepaid developer
- A developer who pays in advance for the use of an API product. Funds are deducted from a prepaid developer's balance when the API product is used. The developer must maintain a prepaid balance sufficient to purchase the API product. Developers are assigned prepaid or postpaid status by the API provider.
- policy
- A processing step that executes as an atomic, reusable unit of logic within an API flow. Typical policies include routing requests to the proper endpoint, transforming a message format, enforcing access control, calling remote services for additional information, masking sensitive data from external users, examining message contents for potential threats, caching common responses to improve performance, and so on. Policies may be conditionally executed based on the content or context of a request or response message. For example, a transformation policy may be executed to customize a response format if the request message was sent from a smartphone.
- postpaid developer
- A developer who is billed monthly for the use of API products. The developer pays for the use of API products based on the payment terms set by the rate plans. Developers are assigned postpaid or prepaid status by the API provider.
- proxy
- Also API proxy. An API proxy is an abstraction layer that fronts for your backend service APIs and provides value-added features such as security, rate limiting, quotas, analytics, and more.
- proxy endpoint
- A proxy endpoint defines the way your API proxy interacts with client applications. You configure the proxy endpoint with a basepath that is part of the URL that your API Proxy responds to. The URL has the form
https://hostname/basepath/pathsuffixes. See Create an API Proxy.
R
- rate plan
- A specification of the fees, other charges, and revenue share for the use of API products offered in a monetized API package.
- replication controller
- Reschedules pods and handles self-healing for pods.
- resource, resource path
- A RESTful concept, a resource path is a uniform resource identifier (URI) that identifies the network path to a given resource.
- revision
- A numbered, version-controlled package of configuration and policies bundled into an API Proxy. This term is distinguished from version, which is the developer-facing API interface. See "version" below.
- runtime plane
Apigee hybrid services that you manage on your own Kubernetes cluster exist within the runtime plane. These services communicate through service accounts with the management plane.
Includes MART, Synchronizer, Message Processors, Cassandra, and other components.
For more information, see About the runtime plane.
- runtime instance
- Apigee can be configured with multiple runtime instances, one per geographic region. One or more Environments can be attached to a runtime instance, thereby providing high availability for API proxies across regions.
- service
A general term for the containerized apps running on your Kubernetes cluster in the runtime plane. These services include MART, Synchronizer, Message Processors, and Cassandra.
For more information, see About the runtime plane.
- stateful node
- A cluster node that requires persistent storage to maintain state. See Configure dedicated node pools.
- stateless node
- A cluster node that does not require persistent storage. See Configure dedicated node pools.
- Synchronizer
A runtime plane service that polls the management plane for deployment configuration and events for each environment. It downloads required metadata about deployed proxies, the proxy configuration files, and more to the runtime plane.
The Synchronizer stores its information on a shared file system that Message Processor reads. This will run as a DaemonSet application; it has no runtime API traffic and it can synchronize data for multiple environments from a single process/Kubernetes pod.
For more information, see About the runtime plane.
- target endpoint
A target endpoint defines the way your API proxy interacts with your backend services. You configure the target endpoint to forward requests to the proper backend service, including defining security settings, HTTP or HTTPS protocol, and other connection information. See Changing the target endpoint.
- top up
- The action taken by a prepaid developer to add funds to the prepaid balance.
- transaction_success_def" id="transaction_success_def">transaction success
- monetization variable, if used, indicates that an API transaction is monetized or not. This variable can be used to override the default behavior which is based on the HTTP status code. See Monetization variables.
- UAP
Unified Analytics Platform. An Apigee service in the management plane that processes incoming analytics, debug, and deployment status data and makes it available to you through the Apigee hybrid UI or the Apigee APIs.
For more information, see Debug, analytics, and deployment status data collection.
- UDCA
Universal Data Collection Agent. A service running within the data collection pod in the runtime plane that extracts analytics, debug, and deployment status data and sends it to the UAP.
For more information, see Debug, analytics, and deployment status data collection.
- version
- The version of the developer-facing API interface. For example,
pivotaltracker.com/services/v3, or api.enterprise.apigee.com/v1. (This term is distinguished fromrevision, which is the numbered, version-controlled package of configuration and policies bundled into an API proxy. In short, API interfaces have versions, while API proxies have revisions. - volume
- Shared storage that can be used by all containerized applications within a pod.
