Apigee

Network Switching in the Cloud: The New Backbone of the App Economy

mgardner — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:55:49 +0000

You don’t have to look very far in the technology or popular press these days to see how the app economy is shaping our world. From studies that credit the app economy with creating more than half a million jobs in the past 5 years of an otherwise sluggish economy – to the effects of the app economy on retail and ecommerce, telecommunications, healthcare, transportation, government, just about all areas of our lives – the app economy is without doubt the driving force of the first decade of the 21^st century.

As we exited the first decade, Big Data joins the app economy in the limelight. Our connected homes, connected cars, and connected people - all of our apps, on all of our devices - provide an explosion of dynamic and disparate data. The third chapter in the evolving app economy story is the Internet of Things. Likely to be the trend in the popular and tech press in 2013, the Internet of Things is all about connecting our every-day devices and objects to the Internet and automatically sending their data to IT systems for analysis.

Because APIs are the drivers of the app economy, and are also core to changing the landscape for enterprise data integration to get deeper business insights and real-time operational feedback, we at Apigee talk a lot about the app economy.

Above and Below the Waterline

One of the things we also talk about is the structure of the Internet that must support all of this – how the Internet backplane must change to accommodate changing usage models on the top. This is probably stating the obvious, but If you were to plot out the “visible” aspects of evolution of Internet usage over the last 20 years or so, for each phase and for each distinct evolution of usage, you could see distinct changes in the employment of technology to enable the wonders we quickly take for granted.

In a way you can think of this as the Visible Internet (today’s app economy), and the Invisible Internet (the structural and management patterns that make the visible Internet possible).

Implications of the Visible Internet on the Invisible Internet

Let’s take a look at the implications of the app economy on the backplane of the Internet and some of the traits below the water line in the backplane.

The evolution of the technology behind the scenes to support the app economy is no less revolutionary than the revolutionary (or even miraculous) ways in which the Internet has transformed business, commerce, and culture. The Internet infrastructure has had to evolve to provide various preconditions to enable what we expect from the app economy, including:

dynamic routing
hosting flexibility
support for transmission
storage and retrieval of bigger and more diverse data sets
speed and ease of application deployment

. . . the list goes on.

To meet these challenges, software developers and vendors have had to raise the bar countless times to deliver software that is as complex as ever, but runs in more challenging contexts than ever before.

The complexity of functionality coupled with the new run-time model means that the software delivered by the enablers of today’s app economy is in many ways the hardest software challenge yet tackled.

This is true of the ever more complicated applications themselves, but also holds for the software development tools used to create those applications, along with modern data and network switching systems - Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.

While Cisco switches and app servers ran the Internet of ten years ago, the demands on and the requirements of backplane routing and architecture have changed. Device and IP-based routing is replaced by cloud-based routing and today's Internet backplane is doing a lot more processing than earlier generations.

Next time we’ll delve into exactly how the visible Internet has changed over the past couple of decades as a result of increasing systems' complexity, as well as new social chemistry and business models. And then, we'll take a deeper dive below the waterline and see how the structural and management patterns of the invisible Internet are changing to support it all.

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Build a Store Locator App with HTML5, PhoneGap & an API-based Backend (webcast recording)

hwhelan — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 05:21:02 +0000

Thanks to those who joined and coded along during this week's webcast! @timanglade demonstrated how to build a store locator app using HTML5 and Adobe PhoneGap, incorporating geolocation and context-aware app features, and deploying easily with Apigee.

The recorded webcast, the final code and the finished app are available below.

	Watch the recording to learn how to build a full, app store-ready app quickly. In this webcast and demo, Tim coded a store locator app from scratch, showing you the stores closest to you, in fewer than 100 lines of code!
	The final code is available on github. And see the finished app here.

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Business Level Monitoring using Traffic Composition Reports

ksrivastava — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:21:50 +0000

Enterprises are adopting API strategies to open up access to their back-end systems enabling developers to innovate and build web and mobile apps. Today's economy is exploding with business being done via apps, and as a result more and more transactions flow from end users and developers to enterprises.

Analytics plays a critical role in the success of an enterprise's API program. Using Apigee Analytics, Apigee Enterprise customers and their developers get visibility into their APIs, apps, and developer traffic. In our latest release, you can access a new "Traffic Composition" report right on the Apigee Enterprise User Interface (no setup required!).

What is Business Level Monitoring?
You are probably already familiar with operational monitoring of your API program. Apigee Analytics provides key metrics like Traffic, Response Time, Errors, Data Exchanged, which offer deep visibility into your API’s quality of service (QoS). You get a level of visibility that enables both tactical and strategic operational activities - everything from dealing with errors and outages in your APIs to capacity planning.

The Traffic Composition Report provides insights into the most valuable entities of an API program - apps, developers, APIs, and resources.

The report enables API program owners to detect business problems such as lower traffic trends or diminishing contribution from key apps and developers. API program owners can also get early notification of new entities that contribute to API traffic, and take actions to respond like enabling their inclusion in nurturing programs.

Business Level Monitoring is the parallel to operational monitoring and is needed by business owners of API programs (such as the API product manager, API program owner, and so on) to monitor the significant entities that drive their programs. Traffic Composition reports show the contribution of entities like APIs, resources, apps, developers and products to your API program traffic.

For each entity type, the report displays the following:

the traffic (in number of messages)
the relative contribution to overall traffic
the traffic trends over time

What key business insights will you get?

Business level monitoring gives you the following kinds of information, which you can use to improve and evolve your API program and your business.

Your Most Valuable Players (MVPs) - the entities that make a sustained contribution to your API program over time. You will also learn the relative contribution of these entities over time to your API program.
New entrants to your MVP set that require nurturing
Previous members of the MVP set that are no longer part of the MVP set

We welcome your questions and comments and would love to hear what you are building with Apigee. Sign up to get started right away.

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Apigee Establishes an Advisory Board

Chet Kapoor — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce the Apigee Advisory Board. The advisory board is comprised of a select group of recognized leaders and visionaries in a range of industries, including retail, banking and finance, telecommunications, automotive, and media. They will provide invaluable global and industry-specific insight into how businesses are increasingly using APIs, apps, and data to accelerate innovation, create new efficiencies, and expand customer reach.

Advisers can also expect to gain from forging cross-industry peer relationships and interactions and from the mutual exchange of experiences and best practices. The Advisory Board is comprised of the following members:

Thaddeus Arroyo, CIO, AT&T

Alan Boehme, Chief of Enterprise Architecture, Innovation & Emerging Technology, Coca-Cola

Bill Gajda, Global Head of Mobile Product, Visa

Mike Linton, Enterprise CMO, Farmers Insurance

Richard Lynch, former EVP at Verizon Communications

Aref Matin, CTO, Pearson

Carole McKluskey, CTO, Coinstar

Deep Nishar, VP of Product, LinkedIn

Nick Pudar, VP, Planning & Business Development, OnStar

Keith Tanski, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Target

For additional background on Apigee's advisory board, please go to the Apigee Leadership Team page.

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API Platform Update: API Proxy Editor, Traffic Composition Reports, Updated Policies . . .

Apigee Product Team — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Today we released a scheduled update for the Apigee API Platform, which gives free open access to the same enterprise-grade API Platform used by industry leaders like Walgreens, eBay, and AT&T.

This update delivers the following new features and improvements.

Gateway Services

Improved Policy Editor (API Proxy Editor)

The Policy Editor has been renamed to the API Proxy Editor, and has been significantly enhanced:

The API Proxy Editor provides a single user interface for both API and policy configuration.
The Map view (now called the Designer view) and Code view are displayed at the same time in the UI. There is no longer a need to toggle from one view to the other.
All properties of policies and other API proxy metadata are exposed through the API Proxy Editor UI.

Developers now have everything they need to configure their API from a single UI. Learn more in Edit your API proxy.

Separation of Token Generation from Storage

You can now store pre-generated tokens and validate against those tokens. You can also generate tokens without storing them in the default API Platform token store.

API Updates

We’ve added an API resource for persistent storage of arbitrary data: /keyvaluemaps
This API resource deprecates the previously exposed /maps API resource. Usage remains the same.

Policy Updates

KeyValueMap policy: We’ve added two elements to KeyValueMap configuration:

PersistInDB: Stores keyvaluemaps in the API Platform data store
Scope: Enables stored data to be scoped to organization, environment, and apiproxy

Learn more in Persist runtime data using KeyValueMap.

AccessEntity policy: We've added secondary identifiers for two-level filtering. Supported ‘types’ available for access at runtime using this policy:

appname
appid
developeremail
developerid
companyname
apiproductname
consumerkey
apiresource

Learn more in Retrieve entity profiles using AccessEntity.

Analytics Services

Traffic Composition Report

The new Traffic Composition Report provides insights into the most valuable entities of an API program (apps, developers, APIs, and resources). For each entity type, the report displays the traffic (in number of messages), the relative contribution to overall traffic, and traffic trends over time. The report enables API program owners to detect business problems such as lower traffic trends or diminishing contribution from key apps and developers. API program owners can also get early notification of new entities that contribute to API traffic, and respond by enabling their inclusion in nurturing programs. See Business Level Monitoring Using Traffic Composition Reports.

See the full release notes including a list of bugs fixed in this release. As always, we look forward to your questions and comments. You can reach us on the User Forum.

We can’t wait to see what you will build with us. Sign up to get started right away.

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Innovator Spotlight: Earth Networks - Using APIs to Deliver Critical Information that Changes with the Weather

Martha Jager — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"When adopting APIs, develop a plan that will scale technically and business-wise as customers deploy your offerings. Anticipate technology and business challenges to more rapidly decrease the learning curve, and grow your business."

Andy Rosenbaum
Director of Development
Earth Networks

Earth Networks gathers and analyzes atmospheric observations from around the world using the world’s largest weather observation and lightning detection networks. Real-time weather intelligence and lightning data – gathered every few seconds from thousands of sensors across the planet – keep businesses, governments and consumers informed with neighborhood-level weather information, updated with the latest forecasts, and alerted to approaching severe weather. The company’s popular WeatherBug® website, desktop, application and mobile apps provide real-time weather and advanced severe weather alerts to millions of consumers. Enterprise solutions from Earth Networks enable organizations and markets, including energy and utilities, agriculture, schools, sports and recreation, emergency operations and government entities, to safeguard lives, prepare for weather and climate events and improve business operations.

Andy Rosenbaum, director of development at Earth Networks - WeatherBug, discusses how the company has increased revenues and accelerated developer adoption through their API program. He explains how the company's new product, the Spark™ HTML5 Mobile Lightning Widget for app developers, taps the power of APIs to report the nearest lightning strike, minute-by-minute, based on a user’s GPS location on their smartphone.

How are you using APIs today?

We collect data from over 35,000 weather sensors around the world, process millions of pieces of data every second “in the cloud,” and deliver that information in the form of weather conditions, forecasts and alerts to our customers in real time. We use internal, partner, and open APIs to deliver localized weather conditions, forecasts and alerts to businesses, governments and consumers.

What need were you addressing with your API strategy?

Weather plays a critical role in our daily lives. It helps us plan our day and know when to head indoors for safety from an approaching storm. For businesses like aviation, transportation and logistics, and energy, weather intelligence informs planning, safety and decision making. This need for atmospheric information will only increase as weather becomes more extreme.

As the owner and operator of the world’s largest weather and total lightning networks, we see continued demand from developers for our exclusive and unique real-time weather and lightning data that is unavailable from any other source. We strive to provide this information to our developer partners in way that is accessible for them to utilize within their enterprise.

How have your APIs evolved over time?

Our first-generation API was XML-based, and it provided a standard way for us to distribute the valuable information from our vast weather and lightning networks. With our open API generating 3,000 transactions per second, we needed a thorough understanding of how this information is being used. And as demand for our API has grown, scalability to meet this demand has increased in importance.

We are expanding our API offering to add more modern output types, such as JSON, to increase developer adoption and distribute to a wider base. We have continued to utilize REST-based services, which have simplified developer usage and have improved our analytics to better understand how to both enhance the API for developers and help us understand where additional business opportunities lie.

In parallel, we developed a new product, our Spark™ HTML5 Mobile Lightning Widget, which extends the API to deliver a customized HTML5 widget that can be tailored for various devices. This enables visualization of changing weather conditions, specifically around real-time lightning proximity alerts.

What does the WeatherBug Spark Lightning Widget provide?

Earth Networks – WeatherBug operates the largest and most comprehensive lightning detection network in the world. Our network produces massive amounts of data during severe weather events with lightning, which we track in real-time. With WeatherBug’s Spark Mobile Lightning Widget, we are making our live lightning data available for the first time, and in a way that makes it possible for developers to quickly integrate valuable data from this network into their own mobile applications.

WeatherBug’s Spark Mobile Lightning Widget is the only product and mobile developer tool that reports the nearest lightning strike, minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile, based on a user’s GPS location on their smartphone. It makes it possible for developers to offer additional and potentially life-saving features to mobile apps aimed at users who enjoy spending time outdoors. The Spark Mobile Lightning Widget for app developers is available no cost to all mobile app developers and designed for easy and quick integration into existing apps.

Rather than having to create a lot of design and development resources to add and understand a very dense and complex data set -- and obtain resources to interpret the data correctly for consumers -- we've provided both the data and a baseline UI to allow app developers to get this feature and information to their users quickly. With the Spark widget, developers can tap into the power of the world's most advanced lightning detection network and give their users access to the most accurate information on lighting strikes.

What kind of business benefits have you experienced as a result of your APIs?

As a result of our APIs, we've been able to increase revenue by providing enterprise clients, for the first time, with measured use access that allows them to use our services in a quantity that more closely matches what they need. We can also get a greater understanding of how our APIs are being used due to Apigee Analytics Services. We've also increased developer adoption by making it easier for developers to learn and use our APIs by deploying Apigee Developer Services within a richer developer portal.

How do you work with Apigee?

We use the Apigee Enterprise API platform in a cloud deployment integrated with enterprise systems that also exist in Amazon's cloud infrastructure.

What is your vision for your API program?

From a business perspective, we see continued growth in our revenue streams as we bring in new clients as part of our API program. We also see the ability to expand reach and brand recognition by enabling easier use of, and value from, our APIs.

From a technology perspective, we see both internal innovation, like our Spark HTML5 Mobile Lightning Widget, and external innovation, from what we learn from partners and developers. Together, these are helping us derive more value and use from the important atmospheric data we uniquely observe, analyze and deliver.

What advice would you offer for those just starting an API program?

It's important to understand the strategy for your API program, the value it will deliver, and the metrics you will use to measure success. Deliver both what customers want and what they need with your API. Learn from them and iterate this insight into the API to improve developer efficiency and your business potential. Don’t just build an API for your apps -- build it for external developers. You will learn more and achieve greater success.

When adopting APIs, develop a plan that will scale technically and business-wise as customers adopt the offerings. Anticipate technology and business challenges to more rapidly go down the learning curve, and grow your business.

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Can't go a Day Without your Critical Mobile Apps? You're in Good Company (Infographic)

Apigee — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 02:34:22 +0000

82% of those surveyed can't go a day without critical apps; 85% admit they would rather give up drinking water than delete all of their mobile apps; 18% of French say they couldn't order dinner without an app.

So says our 2013 Mobile App Behavior survey of over 760 smartphone owners across France, Germany, Spain, the U.K. and U.S., conducted online in February by uSamp.

The survey, which was aimed at revealing mobile app dependency, behavior and future desires across a variety of countries, found that fully 82% of those surveyed believe there are critical apps they can’t go without for even a day, including email (57%), Facebook (41%) and alarm clock apps (31%).

Spain ranked as the most app-reliant country with 93% saying they can’t go one complete day; while half (50%) of U.S. residents saying they couldn’t last just four hours without apps. And the amount of apps people say they use each day is significant: 72% say they use as many as 10 apps per day, and 2% in the global survey even claim they use more than 50 apps per day.

But the study probed deeper at the reactions people have when actually confronted with losing the apps they have come to rely on, and many people around the world report basic things they would be unable to do without apps, including:

• Check email – 48%

• Wake up in the morning – 32%

• Feel happy – 23%

• Navigate to work – 20%

• Maintain my relationship – 19%

• Find dates – 13%

• Order dinner – 12%

• Impress people – 10%

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Innovator Spotlight: Motley Fool: Using APIs to Build the World's Greatest Investment Community

Martha Jager — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

"We want a team to decide they need an API, build it, and launch it the same day it's finished.”

Mark Kennedy
Software Architect
Motley Fool

The Motley Fool is a multi-media financial services company dedicated to building the world's greatest investment community. Reaching millions of people each month through its website, books, subscription newsletter and other outlets, The Motley Fool champions shareholder values and advocates tirelessly for the individual investor.

The Motley Fool's Mark Kennedy, Chris Eldredge and Chris Harris gave us insight into how they are using APIs both to unify their internal systems and expose capabilities in their CAPS stock analysis service. Motley Fool has taken advantage of the latest version of the Apigee API platform with self-service to quickly build and launch APIs.

How do you use APIs at Motley Fool?

Our APIs are mostly for internal use, but we also have some that are public facing and for partners. A good example of the latter is our stock quote API, which makes stock information available to websites around the world. We essentially provide a white label stock quote service through an API.

What technical needs were you addressing with APIs?

In the past, Motley Fool was mostly a technical "mono culture" internally – all our code was in .NET and C#, and we shared services directly in code. We didn't have to worry about services from other systems. But in the last year and a half, we've been branching out to more platforms and languages like Python, Django and PHP. All of these systems needed to be unified so they could efficiently share a common repository of Web services. So we needed to take existing applications that we've had forever in .NET and make those available to other platforms through simple APIs.

What public APIs do you offer?

We have a publicly available API of our community stock analyst simulation, CAPS. This API allows members of the simulation to dig deeper into their personal statistics and create profile or screening widgets to find new investing ideas and similar investors to follow. While we haven’t yet rolled out some portions of the API, including ones related to user authentication and interaction, by using the public APIs we've been able to access our community intelligence data easily in several new systems without needing to refactor our old code.

How has your API strategy evolved?

We had some core data and apps that enable users to manage their stocks, and about two years ago, we closed a deal to post stock data on AOL stock-related sites. Our entire technical architecture was refocused on that initiative, exposing data APIs to AOL. That got us thinking about how we could leverage APIs internally. We don't yet have a ton of APIs and partners, and we're still thinking about how to use them to help integrate different technology stacks together.

We tend to add APIs as one team needs data that exists in another team's domain. We haven't gotten to the point where we build APIs first – but I expect we'll get there.

How do you work with Apigee?

Initially, we worked with Apigee every time we launched a new API. This has changed recently, when we migrated to the newest version of the Apigee API platform. The latest version of Apigee is a lot more self-service, and this is exactly what we want. We want a team to decide they need an API, build it and launch it the same day it's finished. We have launched a couple of APIs with the new self-service Apigee, and it's working well.

What do you see as the technical benefits of using APIs?

APIs let us use the right platform for the job. In the past, if you needed access to our stuff, you needed a .NET stack. By making our core business services available through APIs, we've expanded the possibilities as a tech team to make platform decisions. It gives us new flexibility.

What challenges have you experienced with your APIs?

We have several different teams working on building APIs, and having a good standard for what APIs are going to look like can be difficult. We have a standard defined, but we haven't done a great job of communicating it internally. We need to do a better job of standardizing so that our APIs start looking more similar than dissimilar, and it's hard to get people to use the same sort of patterns. But overall, we haven't had a lot of problems. It's been pretty smooth.

What is your vision for your API program moving forward?

We see ourselves using APIs more and more consistently across applications. We recently deployed a Web application to Amazon Web Services that uses Apigee for all the data services. It has a clean UI logic and a very nice architecture that we'd like to see more of our projects utilize.

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Redefine Omni-Channel Retailing - Harness the Power of APIs (video & slides)

hwhelan — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:08:59 +0000

Thanks to those who attended our recent webcast:
Redefine Omni-Channel Retailing - Harness the Power of APIs. The video and slides are below.

Ed Anuff of Apigee and Balaji TT of Saggezza discussed the power shift in retail towards the connected customer, omni-channel trends, the associated business imperatives, and the requirements for API-enabled retail.

The new mobile and social commerce paradigm - what it means for retailers in 2013
Leveraging APIs to make the omni-channel vision a reality
Optimizing data for interactions in a new world of omni-channel customer experiences

Redefine Omni-Channel Retailing - Harness the Power of APIs from Apigee

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Developer workshop series coming to Austin Mar 1-2: Build your first mobile app with HTML5 and a BaaS

scott — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:43:37 +0000

Want to build a mobile app and have it ready for the app store in a day?

Join us for a 100% free workshop in Austin on either Friday, March 1st or Saturday, March 2nd and learn how. Our recent code camp workshop in LA was a ton of fun - our sold-out crowd of developers built HTML5 apps using Apigee App Services from scratch.

No need to be an expert programmer! We teach you everything you need to know to build a mobile app from scratch- HTML5, jQuery Mobile, PhoneGap, Apigee App Services . . .
Register here to go from zero to app store in a day in Austin, TX.

Some things developers who attended the training in LA had to say:

“I learned new stuff. Training was interactive. The instructor was really helpful.”

“Thanks a lot for coming to LA, we need more people who can create dynamic apps using a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) like Apigee."

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