Why Apigee over Layer 7

[#1]

Why Apigee over Layer 7?

Please provide additional features of Apigee over Layer7?

[DChiesa]

I don't really know the Layer 7 product, so cannot provide you with much of an answer. Some customers who have evaluated both may have a perspective.

If you have a specific question about Apigee Edge, I might be able to help you.

[naggc]

This has been an interesting journey for us and its not a simple one to decide. I can spend all day talking about this with Pros and Cons for each product and in the end, you will have to decide based on your business needs. You can look at industry rankings, talk to customers and more importantly try both out, in the end support and innovation matters.

In short I can share some main points that helped make us a decision at the time:

1. Apigee tool is quick to learn - This is Probably the biggest advantage over CA GW that writing a proxy is much much easy. I can bring a newbie, get them some documentation and they can write a quick proxy. CA is trying to get there with cloud offering,but still relies on experts writing it, a steap learning curve for a newbie
2. Product roadmap and external tie ups (like pivotal)
3. Apigee Community
4. Apigee Support and knowledge of Industry standards
5. Roadshows

There were some advantages CA had that included better Portal UI, developer onboarding, re-use of policies, extensive features for writing a policy(proxy)...

If you want to talk more, feel free to reach out to me.

[anshul_]

I have been working on Apigee edge since 2013 and I have found it pretty easy and simple to develop and expose the APIs. No doubt, Apigee provided video tutorials are pretty awesome and help the beginners to start with it. Even if you stuck somewhere there are too many Apigee Gurus who are always there to help you out.

The only issue that I find with Apigee is that many times some of their core functionalities shows inconsistent behaviour or doesn't work as documented. For instance, very recently we came to know that Apigee doesn't look for target's SSL certificates if you don't define a truststore, even when target's certificates are CA signed. As a customer, I would love to rely on Apigee's documentation and don't want to test if its core functionalities are working as expected.

But I would still recommend Apigee because of its simplicity to develop, expose and maintain your API

[#5]

If you're still looking, you might also find this direct comparison between Apigee and CA API Management (formerly Layer 7) on IT Central Station to help you with your research.