The solution consists of the following systems
- Developer portal to attract and engage application developers, enabling them to discover, explore, purchase (or profit from) and test APIs and register to access and use the APIs
- API gateway to secure and mediate the traffic between clients and backends, and between a company’s APIs and the developers, customers, partners, and employees who use the APIs
- API lifecycle management to manage the process of designing, developing, publishing, deploying and versioning APIs
The Problem – Use Case
Our customer is a startup that creates a new generation shipping service for last mile delivery for multiple countries. There are many challenges about these regions – specific geo targeting, getting the right delivery method and making tracking of the package delivery. Their main audience for customers are electronic shops and stores, who need to serve their clients with fast service delivery within this region.
From the ground point, our customer has multiple systems and a plan to migrate this to another system plus scale and advance their IT infrastructure. There is high demand and security regulations for those systems and as part of the business process our team need to expose these system services for customers. That means we need to have a good way to provide manageable API with ability to scale, secure and support.
Also the shop owners have their infrastructure mostly based on well known marketplace platforms solutions such as Shopify, Maento and Woocommerce products and they also need the best approaches to integrate delivery into the existing business process.
Our Solution – Google’s Apigee API Management Platform
It was implemented with the help of Apigee Edge platform (owned by Google) and deployed in the cloud with the ability to scale under the load. Each shop owner can use a self-managed portal to issue a set of API keys, review the documentation and see examples of usage for API.
The Apigee engine allowed us to create transformations for different existing legacy services with the ability to transform this for future deployed systems without the need to change API. Transformations are made with built-in XML rules and programmable NodeJS transformation. As logger backend we’ve integrated cloud Splunk so we can have analytics and alert management in case of emergency.
For integration with Stores platforms we have created a set of plugins. Each plugin allows us to take information known to the platform (such as Shopify) and transform this to API calls to gather information for further management within the platform. Shop owners have to install the plugins, configure API keys and enable integration. Following this they can manually process or batch all the orders for delivery with the shipping delivery service.
The Result
These solutions greatly enhance our customers business and are made available for a wide range of retailers in multiple countries. As the result of our effort, our customer demonstrated the ability to grow quickly.
