Differences between API development platform e.g APIGEE and ESB

Question

Me and my team will be working on APIGEE which is an API development platform to expose some services in our application. I am going through their documentation and also trying to understand the need of APIGEE or any other API development platform like Mashery. One very good article on the need of API proxy as been very well explained in the given link, http://apievangelist.com/2011/06/11/the-battle-for-your-api-proxy/

One question that i am confused about is What is the difference between APIGEE and any ESB like ALSB or Mule. We know Apigee too supports message transformation via policies and protocols like http/https/soap.

Can anyone please tell me the differences between the two? Does Esb support more protocols like SMTP/JMS etc.

Any information is most welcome

Answer 1

Though API management definition is still evolving but API management is defined as transforming APIs to reach to your target audience [ here is a good description - http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/definition/API-management].

This technology has it's root in SOA but different from ESB.

ESB is more for system-to-system integration but API tends to be securely exposing your internal systems in a managed fashion to wider audience - we call them "developers".

ESB tends to be equipped with many adapters and strong message oriented middleware for supporting different interaction patterns. It is also generally couple with business process management software to automate internal processes by integrating multiple services or systems.

API management also does some integrations and orchestrations but focus is more simplifying the interfaces to easier consumption of the services - that's why it is always come with developer on-boarding capabilities, security , caching , api design , oauth etc.

Apigee gateway service [ API management platform ] has support for limited JMS and SMTP functionality serving our diverse customer base and our technology stack is capable of building other protocol support.

Many API management products [ including Apigee gateway ] also include API analytics to help you getting insight of API program and API traffic.

Answer 2

Nowadays, APIGEE and Mule are direct competitors in the API management offering realm. In the case of Mule, there was a great transformation on the company, towards API-ification of all systems. Current Mule runtime is integrated with strong API management capabilities including analytics (functionalities from the former Mulesoft's API Gateway product, which was merged into the Mule runtime since v3.8.0), as well the usual ESB capabilities. Further info is available at Mule dev doc site.

Answer 3

API Management & ESB are two different capabilities which may have little overlap in terms of exposing the integrations themselves as API's which Mulesoft does.

Apigee also supports few ESB capabilities but it's not as exhaustive as Mulesoft. Ofcourse ESB is bigger scope & if you don't need that capability & just need API management with Full API lifecyle Mulesoft & APIGee both serves that need.

Personally I am a big fan of Mulesoft's API policies which comes out of box & it's an exhaustive list.