Why Google Cloud acquired Apigee API Platform ?

google-apigee-cloudGoogle Cloud Platform business unit acquired Apigee, a provider of application programming interface. Apigee provides an API platform that can be used by companies to make their services available on multiple mobile devices. Apigee also provides its customers analytics to measure the activity coming from the apps. As an example, Walgreens uses Apigee to manage the Walgreens APIs that developers use to build apps for the Walgreens ecosystem.

This enhances Google’s push into corporate computing as they look to take advantage of the evolving industry dynamics. Google’s head of cloud computing Diane Greene stated as follows

companies are moving beyond traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs

The addition of Apigee and their customer base will help Google expand their platform as they attempt to narrow the wide margin in which they trail AWS. Amazon and Microsoft have built sizable leads in cloud infrastructure over the past decade. Google has also been expanding upon the capabilities of Kubernetes within the Google Cloud Platform. Kubernetes is a powerful open-source software that allows developers to automatically deploy and scale applications across a clustered processing system.

API management and security becomes more important in a cloud-centric world and both GCP and AWS have already launched offerings. AWS offers a fully-managed API service called API Gateway, and in early September 2016, GCP announced the beta release of its Cloud Endpoints service, a new API management suite built to handle the growth in micro-services. It will be interesting to see how GCP combines its home-grown Endpoints product with Apigee and how Apigee, which has also has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft, will work to maintain these relationships with GCP’s rivals.

Google’s Mantra now is – Grow Cloud Computing via Acquisitions and Partnerships