Edge Gateway vs Microgateway,Apigee Edge vs Microgateway

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What exact policies and features of Apigee Edge are missing in Microgateway?

Are these differences documented somewhere?

Need this for a quick decision whether we should use Microgateway or not.

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First a clarification. Microgateway do not offer the concept of policies, at least not in the way Edge does.

You can learn about the policies offered by Edge here:

http://docs.apigee.com/api-services/reference/reference-overview-policy

You can learn about Microgateway capabilities of features here:

http://docs.apigee.com/microgateway/latest/overview-edge-microgateway

You may also want to learn about Hybrid Cloud API Management options:

https://apigee.com/about/blog/technology/edge-microgateway-hybrid-cloud-api-management

@Hitesh Parikh , Welcome to Apigee Community.

Apigee Edge Micro-gateway is not a replacement / clone for Edge gateway. It's designed for light weight stuff like key verification, quota & other mediations that you can do near to your backend services at the same time leveraging powerful cloud features like Analytics, Key Management, Developer OnBoarding.

Micro-gateway do offer plugins very similar to policies in Apigee Edge. You can find the list here. You can also developer custom plugins which are nothing but policies of Edge Micro-gateway. More details you can find here. You can find the Apigee Edge out of the box policies list here.

Some resources related to Microgateway,

Would love to understand your use cases & why exactly you are thinking about micro-gateway instead of Apigee Edge. Please keep us posted.

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@Maudrit, @Anil Sagar


Thank you for your detailed responses. I appreciate that.

We are going to run microservices in Pivotal Cloud Foundry. There are two instances of API Edge Gateway, one in a public cloud (AWS) and another in data centers. The Edge instance in data centers are expected to route traffic to routers in PCF in data center. I am assuming same could be done even for the Edge in cloud where it could point to PCF router IPs in cloud or data center.

There is another Apigee Edge /PCF integration pattern using Edge as a service using service broker in PCF. Not clear what advantage Edge as a service when used from PCF has over configuring Edge as the entry point.

All of this various Edge usage patterns led me to investigate Edge MG capabilities. If we have to do microservices aggregation, there could be lot of traffic going out of PCF microservices to Edge over the network, that could add significant network latency. Edge looked like a good fit for this usecase of inter microservices interaction we may need for Experience microservices. We are considering using aggregation in experience microservice instead of proxy due to complex business logic.

I could probably create proxies for domain services in Edge MG and Edge both. The once in Edge MG could be used for inter microservices interactions. Proxies in Edge could be used by UI applications. However, this involves creation of duplicate proxies, one in Edge and another in Edge MG, which could be maintenance overhead.

@Hitesh Parikh there are several points on the questions above. And without the full understanding of your requirements and infrastructure the feedback may be limited.

In regards to your question about Edge Private Cloud and/or Public Cloud being able to send traffic to your Microservices on Pivotal. Absolutely!, you can do it.

It is just a matter of using the appropriate definitions for target servers, service callouts or any other method you may be using to call your Microservices.

Sending traffic to PCF directly is an option but passing that traffic through Edge gives you all the additional capabilities and features provided by Edge to enrich, protect and get relevant analytics data about those APIs.

MicroGateway will work well as long as the capabilities offered are sufficient for the use cases you want to implement. Having distributed API management capabilities is one of the reasons why we developed MicroGateway.

I suggest scheduling time with one of our Technical Solutions (Customer Success) architects to discuss ideas. As mentioned earlier, without good understanding the full set of requirements, assumptions and constrains the feedback is limited.

Former Community Member
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@Hitesh Parikh

Please see this link: https://www.slideshare.net/apigee/apigee-edge-intro-to-microgateway for difference between Edge Microgateway and Edge Enterprise gateway. The presentation also has a slide about when to use which gateway.

There are three patterns Edge support with PCF - of which two of them use Microgateway.

1) Route Services with an Apigee Edge proxy deployed on cloud/on prem

2) Router Services with Apigee Microgateway deployed on PCF

3) A Microgateway buildpack.

The patterns are not mutually exclusive. Depending on the use case for each API you can choose one of the options.

The slideshare URL is blocked by our organization. Is there a way you could post it as a PDF link to us please?