Some customers use Apigee as a lightweight PaaS - is this a good idea or not?

[#1]

With the advent of Node support, and before that with Java, Javascript, and Python Resource Callouts, customers have been using Edge as a lightweight PaaS platform. Implementing aggregation, orchestration, and even business logic in Edge is a quick way to get APIs up and running. API BaaS is a lightweight distributed passivation engine suitable for many of these use cases.

Is this a supported usage pattern?

Will Apigee expand Edges PaaS-like features in the future?

[#2]

It depends on what you mean by lightweight PaaS. We do enable you to embed Node.js-based workloads into Apigee Edge so it’s easy to see this as PaaS-like. But, this is really no different than the way that ESBs allow you to embed logic and process flows. We provide our Node.js capability to make it easy to do things like API mashups in a code-based way. It’s up to you to figure out the tipping point for when you want to separate this into a separate runtime layer. We have deep integration with platforms like Cloud Foundry so that you can do real application development coupled with API exposure.

[#3]

well said @Ed Anuff. One of the key roles of API management layer is to be able to provide you with visibility into what is happening with your APIs. The visibility is impaired when the API layer has “stuff” that is difficult to peer into.

On the other hand, the internet style architecture of the API layer allows you to leverage, for example, Apigee’s investments in scaling and running API style workloads to run some PaaS like code. You have a layer of API management, and you have legacy backends. You might decide that introducing a PaaS layer is one layer too many. But you will tradeoff the flexibility of a PaaS with the particular style of API scaling. That is why we have a partnership with Pivotal -- the right architecture in the right place. That is why we integrate deeply with AWS lambda. You make the choice. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it does not.

[#4]

If the emphasis is getting traffic flowing quickly, then using Resource Callouts or Node based targets is a very good way to go -- at least initially.

As Ed alludes to customers should have a clear idea of when and how they would migrate Apigee deployed orchestrations/business logic to another tier. This is a key part of how Apigee enables multimodal IT.