Developers creating applications and microservices for the Google Cloud Platform now have a new way to monitor, manage and secure their cloud Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
The company this week announced general availability of Google Cloud Endpoints, an Application Programming Interface (API) management suite for cloud services customers. The technology features a server-local proxy dubbed the Extensible Service Proxy, which acts as a distributed gateway for managing APIs on any Google cloud backend.
The proxy can be added with a few lines of code to any Google Container Engine or Kubernetes container orchestration deployment Google product manager Dan Ciruli announced in a blog this week.
Ciruli described Cloud Endpoints as technology that can help cloud administrators address critical issues pertaining to API security, performance and optimization.
Cloud Endpoints, for instance, is integrated with Google Firebase mobile messaging and notification technology and with Auth0 user authentication technology. It authenticates all calls to an API so administrators can keep tab on users of enterprise mobile and web applications, Ciruli said.
Cloud Endpoints can also help administrators better secure microservices running on Google cloud by monitoring for and validating all service-to-service calls. Similarly, Cloud Endpoints allows administrators to get critical information on the performance status and health of their APIs by logging all API calls in Stackdriver, Google’s real-time log management and analysis technology.
Users can store API call log information in Stackdriver and search through them, analyze them, and set alerts based on events and log data not just from Google but Amazon Web Services as well.
“Cloud Endpoints is tightly integrated with the GCP ecosystem and is easy to use especially when running containerized workloads,” Ciruli said. It is especially useful for Google cloud platform customers looking for a fast and scalable gateway for managing APIs.
Google has been beta testing Endpoints with selected customers for the past three months and early feedback has been encouraging with some enterprises going from initial evaluation to production in a matter of days, the Google product manager claimed.
In addition to Endpoints, Google also offers Apigee Edge, an API development and management proxy that the company acquired with its $625 million purchase of Apigee last year. Google executives have previously highlighted the importance of these API management technologies to its goal of enabling more enterprise-ready cloud services. Cloud APIs basically enable quicker web and mobile client access to data across multiple cloud applications.
Cloud Endpoints is available for free for the first two million API calls each month. After that threshold, Google will charge $3 per million requests, according to Ciruli.
In addition to Cloud Endpoints, Google this week also announced general availability for its Java and Python Endpoints Frameworks for App Engine. The frameworks basically contain a set of libraries and tools that allow organizations to generate APIs and client libraries from App Engine applications, according to an official Google description.