Google to acquire Apigee

[msoad]

Google didn't pay for the technology. Apigee has a good set of big enterprise customers that Google was missing on their cloud platform. As others mentioned, Google already have the tech: https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/

[sinzone]

Google Endpoint was discussed last week on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12407061

[illicium]

Compare the feature set of Endpoints to Edge. There's more to API management than authentication and monitoring.

[mathattack]

Was it really that much about customers? Apigee has less than 100 million in revenue.

[gizmodo59]

2018: Support is discontinued. Please use our forums where intelligent bots will reply you.

2020: We are now discontinuing Apigee.

[pluma]

I misread that as "to acquire Apple". Then I misread that again as "to acquire Apogee" (as in, the name 3D Realms went by from 1987 to 1996).

Now I'm wondering behind the reasoning of the Apigee brand. Was it an intentional play on Apogee Software of the 80s/90s? If so, why? Something about "playing with APIs" I presume, but that seems confusing.

[randallsquared]

The word "apogee" literally means the highest point in the course of something. Apogee Software and Apigee both play off the english word meaning.

[oldmanjay]

I keep seeing it as a really strange spelling of "a piggie" and then I think "there had to be a better name than that"

[samfisher83]

I thought I read apogee too. I remember their early 90s games like Rise of the triad and duke nukeem.

[bluedino]

Apogee used to also be a compiler company, it's where the domain apogee.com has pointed as long as I can remember. They used to have a link to the shareware company iirc. Now it looks like they provide Java runtimes for embedded devices

[nl]

Well considering Apigee is a public company with hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprise and has been around since the early 2000s... no?

It's a pretty decent name for an API gateway.

[k-mcgrady]

There is also Apogee Electronics the audio hardware company.

[knz]

I also read it initially as "acquire Apple" and had to check the date...

[nl]

Apigee is a pretty decent product if you are in the space. It's sort of kinda like a "CDN for APIs", if that make sense, which I've always thought is a great idea.

(Yes, I realize my analogy has limits. Don't get too hung up on it though)

I didn't realize they were a public company though.

[internal_tools]

I think this is an excellent acquisition by Google, specifically for their cloud platform. It provides an excellent solution to the problem of managing apis and a tight integration with cloud platform will really make it stand out.

[PaulHoule]

These various "API management" services have always struck me as value subtracting as much as value adding. Adding another moving part to a system doesn't make it more reliable.

One thing that has amazed me is that most of these services offer everything but the kitchen sink AND the one thing you need for a minimum viable product, which is the ability to charge for API calls.

[antoncohen]

What a bizarre acquisition. They say:

> A good API needs to [...] give developers the freedom to work in the development environment of their choice [...] a good API includes testing support

Those are two of the main reasons not to use Apigee.

[ajainy]

3Scale got acquired by IBM, and now APIGEE by google. Time to buy Layer7 shares?

API Gateways are big deal in API first initiatives.

[niftich]

Mashery was acquired by Intel [1] in April 2013, Layer7 was acquired by CA Technologies [2] the same month.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/source-mashery-is-selling-... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/ca-acquires-layer-7-techno...

[wing328hk]

3Scale was acquired by Redhat (not IBM): https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acqui...

[mxuribe]

My day job used 3scale. Actually it won out against apigee, mashery, and a few other big players. My day job liked a few others because they were associated to "big enterprise names" - especially since my day job is a big enterprise. I think 3scale were still kind of pricey, but way cheaper than the other big players...However, I give big kudos for 3scale support, especially during on-ramping.

[patwolf]

IBM bought Strongloop last year as an API gateway play.

[abakker]

The major acquisitions in this space already happened...

CA bought layer7. Mulesoft bought programmable web. Intel bought and divested mastery. Microsoft bought Apiphany.

The last one standing is Akana, (formerly SOA Software).

APIgee was always a weird company to go public - I think it makes sense for them to be part of google. More of a feature that belongs in some other cloud management stack.

[edwinnathaniel]

Layer7 was acquired by CA Tech a few years ago

[tootie]

Fastly is the biggest one left independent I think. They've got some top clients like github.

[doppenhe]

They announced this a couple of weeks ago... im confused: https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/

[theDoug]

Cloud Endpoints as announced is the second generation of Google's own system.

Apigee is a different company and set of products.

[j_s]

Apigee sent out the email today.

[supergeek133]

Well. At first I thought this was crazy, but then I realized Google was the only major cloud provider that didn't offer an API Gateway service... Azure and AWS both have one.

So, makes sense. They got them cheap as well, only a really small premium of the stock price.

[bduerst]

Google has endpoints, but it's pretty low level and a little hard to manage that way.

[aikah]

Never understood Apigee's core product. I like their whitebooks though. quite informative. So congratulations.

[kyork]

We use Apigee's Edge product. It provides API management tools like authentication, authorization, rate limiting, etc before the request hits your actual API. Its a pretty good product, if that isn't your core competency.

[kelvin0]

Is it just me, or should API management be done through GraphQL? It doesn't seem like Apigee even uses GraphQL (unless I missed something on their website). Been looking at GraphQL recently, and it looks like it could be a solution. Any experience on using GraphQL in a prod environment?

EDIT: I think Apigee has a great product, not wanting to put them down.

[sorenbs]

We moved our entire api to Apigee at my previous job (500+ person fast growing startup). It certainly has value and was a great fit for us. Many aspects of the Apigee stack felt kinda weird and cumbersome though and I saw such a huge potential for improvement if you started with GraphQL as the base assumption instead of REST. So that's what we are doing at https://graph.cool/ :-)

We are currently in closed beta, but I'd be happy to personally onboard you or chat if that would be helpful. (contact in profile)

[olalonde]

> As always, we'll make sure that these capabilities are available in the public clouds and can also be used on-premises.

Does that mean there's a chance Apigee will get open sourced? (fingers crossed)

[ctdean]

$625 million in cash

[cobookman]

Curious if they used cash from their domestic or international reserves.

[niftich]

So does this mean Apigee will be the captive API gateway for Google's extensive portfolio of APIs, or will the Apigee gateway still be offered as a product to put in front of a customer's custom API?

[nl]

I think that it doesn't make a lot of sense for Google to use Apigee on its own APIs. They seem to do a pretty decent job of scaling, monitoring and securing them on their own.

What does make a lot of sense is a tool to give people who host on the Google cloud better control over who is using APIs they (the customers) produce. For example, you can imagine Apigee expanding to enable transparent scaling of (some) self-hosted APIs onto Google's cloud via intelligent caching.

[CrunchQL]

It makes no mention of using it on Google's APIs at all.

Within the blog it elaborates on what they're doing by saying:

> Google cloud customers are already benefitting from no sys-ops dev environments, including Google App Engine and Google Container Engine. Now, with Apigee’s API management platform, they'll be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs.

>As always, we'll make sure that these capabilities are available in the public clouds and can also be used on-premises.

If you click on the link and read the article it will give information behind the headline, possibly answering questions the headline brings up.

[yueq]

Buying offer is 17.40. Right now Apigee's trading at 17.42, short selling opportunity?

[firefoxNX11]

Apigee has a lot of smart engineers working on nodejs based open source projects and contributing to OpenApi spec (fka Swagger). Good to see that Chet K chose Google to acquire these talented engineers. And ofcourse the Apigee community is A++.

[doublerebel]

Hi firefoxNX11, it looks like you misspelled a link a year and a half ago and accidentally linked to a phishing site. You have been shadowbanned since, I saw you with showdead on. It looks like you have made constructive comments otherwise, perhaps a mod can help out!

[hellofunk]

I first read this as "Google to acquire Apple" and I found myself wondering if today was in the month of April.

[chatmasta]

Aw man I bought a bunch of these shares last year at $7 and sold for $7.90 after a few months. I was happy about it. Wish I held onto them, it's trading at $17 now!

[komali2]

It's a bummer but you couldn't have known. Just keep making smart investments.