
Google to acquire Apigee - ctdean
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-to-acquire-apigee.html
======
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/](https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/)

~~~
sinzone
Google Endpoint was discussed last week on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12407061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12407061)

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gizmodo59
2018: Support is discontinued. Please use our forums where intelligent bots
will reply you.

2020: We are now discontinuing Apigee.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
I thought the same thing. We saw this play out before with Parse. Not saying
they play in the same space, but I think Google could just roll the Apigee
features into Firebase and shutter the platform.

~~~
kelvin0
The good ol' MS motto *(back in the days..): Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish)

~~~
breakingcups
That's not the same at all. EEE was about adopting existing standards used by
other products and then extending them with features other products didn't
support.

~~~
profeta
well, at that time we had standards...

and on the few places we still have, this is what google is doing with chrome
on the w3c.

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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.

~~~
jedanbik
So there's that, and then the Apigee split out like Api-gee makes you think
gee, that must have something to do with APIs.

~~~
cptskippy
Gee makes me think Ghee which makes me want Indian food. Indian food comes
from India where we outsource software development and APIs are used in
software development.

So it's a circular reference.

~~~
p333347
Gee!

------
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.

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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.

~~~
binaryanomaly
I think you work for apigee

~~~
cptskippy
Or he still has his stock options.

~~~
internal_tools
I wish. Can I get stock options for being optimistic?

~~~
binaryanomaly
Nah, only a useless job in mgmt or so. Maybe dogbert can help.

------
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.

~~~
antxxxx
Apigee provides the ability to charge the users of your APIs for API calls

~~~
sjg007
So it's just a proxy on top?

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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.

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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-...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/source-mashery-is-selling-to-
intel-for-more-than-180m/) [2] [https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/ca-acquires-
layer-7-techno...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/ca-acquires-
layer-7-technologies-to-connect-cloud-mobile-and-internet-of-things-as-api-
market-starts-to-consolidate/)

~~~
imaffett
Intel divested Mashery, along with Aepona and dropped their cloud services
division.

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

~~~
brazzledazzle
I wonder what the engineers on the Google team that just released that is
thinking?

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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.

~~~
homakov
But apigee becomes a man in the middle, which is very bad for your security.

~~~
fixermark
I imagine it's a tradeoff. It's worse for your security if you try to roll
your own auth/auth solution and botch it.

~~~
homakov
Auth is a routine job, only a really silly developer manages to make simple
token auth vulnerable. There's no a "tradeoff" in leaving auth to MitM because
it's "hard", oh also there's bunch of libraries out there doing it for you on
your servers.

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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/](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)

~~~
kelvin0
Thanks for the feedback, makes sense to me. Although,I don't understand why
mentioning GraphQL gets me downvoted. I'm trying to understand what advantages
Apigee has using REST over GraphQL. No hating, just curious.

[https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-
int...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-
introduction.html)

"We plan to open-source a reference implementation of a GraphQL server and
publish a language specification in the coming months. Our goal is to evolve
GraphQL to adapt to a wide range of backends, so that projects and companies
can use this technology to access their own data. We believe that this is a
compelling way to structure servers and to provide powerful abstractions,
frameworks and tools – including, but not exclusively, Relay – for product
developersWe plan to open-source a reference implementation of a GraphQL
server and publish a language specification in the coming months. Our goal is
to evolve GraphQL to adapt to a wide range of backends, so that projects and
companies can use this technology to access their own data. (...)"

------
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.

~~~
scapecast
Will have to be US cash because Apigee is based in the US.

They can use their Euro cash in Europe for acquisitions and not pay the US
taxes.

Think Microsoft / Skype. Skype was based in Luxembourg.

~~~
cloudjacker
They could sell bonds to Draghi and get paid to acquire it tax free.

------
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?

~~~
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.

~~~
niftich
I appreciate the summary but I was speculating about things that weren't said
(in the article). Specifically, as you point out, the article makes no
statement on whether they will dogfood Apigee for internal use, but recently
they acquired Firebase where dogfooding it was a part of the play.

Meanwhile, there's these lines:

> 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.

It unnecessarily combines two different things in the same sentence; "you can
continue to rely on your stuff running in Google App Engine and Google
Container Engine"; and "you can front your stuff with Apigee Edge" \-- yes, I
can already do both of these things today. So what's the difference?

------
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!

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

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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.

