Google Cloud announces general availability of APIM Operator for Apigee

We're excited to announce the general availability of the Apigee APIM Operator, a new feature that brings lightweight API Management and API Gateway capabilities to your GKE environment. This release marks a significant step in our strategy to enable Apigee for API management on any gateway, anywhere.

What does this mean for developers?

• Developer-Native Tooling: For the many cloud-native businesses using CNCF-standardized tooling, you can now configure API management using Kubernetes-like YAML, eliminating the need to switch between different tools.

• Reduced Friction: By supporting APIM with Kubernetes and CNCF toolchains, we're reducing the conceptual and operational friction for service developers and platform administrators.

• Policy Management: Admins can create APIM template rules with RBAC, allowing different groups to use different sets of policies based on their needs. Users and admins can also add various Apigee policies to APIM templates, achieving a comparable level of functionality to Apigee Hybrid.

Key Features and Capabilities

The GA release enables customers to configure a GKE cluster and GKE Gateway to use an Apigee Hybrid instance for API management through a traffic extension (ext-proc callout). It also provides API lifecycle management using YAML-based policies operated through the Kubernetes/CNCF toolchain and offers factory-built-in starter defaults for Day-Zero with workload tailoring.

Addressing Customer Needs

This feature addresses the growing need for developer-friendly tooling that simplifies API management. Apigee, with its perceived complexity and the requirement to switch from kubectl to other tooling, was seen as less agile. The APIM Operator is our response to this feedback, providing a more streamlined and efficient way to manage APIs.

Looking Ahead

Building on the strong foundation of this GA release, we are exploring potential future enhancements such as gRPC and GraphQL support to accommodate a wider range of API types. We are also evaluating ways to address current limitations concerning the number of Gateway resources and policy attachments, and will update the community as new features and support become available.

We believe that the APIM Operator will significantly improve the developer experience and streamline API management for our customers. We are excited to see the innovative ways you will use this feature to build and deploy your applications.