Developers creating companies within the dev portal.

[#1]

Hi,

I am looking into optimal methods to configure Apigee for our organisation. The Company entity looks like that it will be useful for grouping Applications for reporting against potential partners. Which leads to the my following question.

What type of role/user can create a Company? I have observed as a Apigee Edge user, I can create a Company via the API, but can Companies be created via the Dev portal by other enabled Developers? Or to create a Company, do you have to be an identified User outlined in the Bundles Spec Sheet (i.e. on of the 5 users identified as part of the Apigee Business Bundle).

A related question what is the normal/best practice configuration of a partners/vendor as a Company as described above or as their own Organisation in their own right.

Note, as this stage we do not have the monetization Add-on, but this could be an option in the future.

Thanking the community in advance

Bruce

[anilsr]

@brucejenkins , Great Questions,

Reagarding, What type of role/user can create a Company?

• By Default, When you enable Monetization in Developer Portal, Monetization Administrator, Finance Administrator, Developer roles are automatically created.
• Users with Monetization Administrator Role can create the companies in Developer Portal.
• You can control which role can create companies in Developer Portal using Permissions screen. You can pick & choose with a single click.
• You can also create new custom roles & choose who get access to what in Apigee Developer Portal.

Developers in Developer Portal are not related to 5 users identified as part of the Apigee Business Bundle. You can have unlimited users in Developer Portal. 5 Users are Apigee Edge UI users.

Regarding, A related question what is the normal/best practice configuration of a partners/vendor as a Company as described above or as their own Organisation in their own right.

It depends, I believe you mean partner / vendor who will be consuming APIs built by you.

If yes, If you have monetization add on , You can go with company approach.

If not, You can create a simple custom role in Apigee Developer Portal & Assign role to particular partner / vendor & control who get access to which API products & documentation using out of the box Developer Portal RBAC features.

Hope it helps. Keep us posted moving forward if any.

[#3]

Thanks Anil, this answer is very helpful.

If I can explore the response to my second question a little further, you are correct I was framing the question question as partner / vendor who will be consuming APIs built by us. In this light, and in the first instance we not having a a monetization add-on,

Can we still create a simple custom role in Apigee Developer Portal & Assign role to particular partner / vendor, to manage their own developers and applications? To do this will they need to be one of the Apigee Edge UI users to have this level of control?

Thanks for your patience, while I get my head around our configuration options.

Bruce.

[ksprashu]

Hi @brucejenkins , adding some more flavor to the answers.

There is a differentiation between users and developers. Developers are those that belong to a company or not and can create apps on the platform. These are app developers and are not counted against the user license. Users are those that are added to the system which allows access to features of the platform such as analytics, API development etc and it is to these users that you will assign a role. These users are counted against the license count.

As for the Role that can create the companies, you can always create custom roles that have access to specific APIs that lets you work on specific functionality of Edge. So there is no one specific role that can create a company or not, but you can define your roles that allow access to create companies.

Now on to your requirements. As I understand you need a way to group applications from a partner for reporting purpose. What you can use for this are custom attributes on developers (since developers belong to a company / partner). So, when a developer is registered on the system via the portal or any other means, you can introduce a custom attribute on that developer which identifies the partner. This data can be pushed into analytics using the statistics collector policy and thereby you will find the information that you require in the reporting.

Partners are not on-boarded as an organization normally. If what you need is that your partners are just consuming your APIs then you can do very well with companies or custom attributes as described above. But if your partners have a requirement that they want complete isolation of their APIs and its runtime into its own tenant, then you might have to go with a separate org for that partner. However both the management plane and the runtime plane are isolated for this partner and you will need to take this into account in your SDLC.

Hope this helps.

Prashanth