Few scenarios 1. For viewing API analytics, I think it is best in the market 2. For earning money via API monetization 3. Securing API 4. Onboarding legacy APIs to provide modern REST endpoints
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
Prohibited from using JSON.stringify on Apigee objects (tokens)
Debugging is difficult
Unable to rename or delete policies without bumping revision
Why would anyone give a js policy one name, display name something else, and script a different name?
'Trace' limited to only 20 transactions
UI allows users to add target servers, but users must utilize the api to turn on SSL.
I'm sure there's more, they just aren't coming to mind right now.
Apigee forgets (expires?) your password at random intervals without notice. Every few weeks, or days, sometimes even three times in one day, I'll attempt to login to Apigee and my password will be 'wrong'. I've reset my password and Apigee still claims it's wrong. I've had to reset my password three times before it finally let me log back in.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
I am not the one deciding whether to use apigee or not really. But personally, I would recommend the use of it as developing APIs on it is easy. And as a mediator between backend servers, we could easily modify request and responses in it without touching any backend code while having a centralize gateway to access our backend APIs too.
Quite hard to get support, at least on the coding side, when we encounter blockers. But general concerns, they would schedule a call to you for them to get a whole picture of your concern. Albeit in my experience, bad really as they haven't replied about the progress, but otherwise seems to have been fixed.
Apigee is the best in the market in terms of API Analytics Apigee is having wonderful Documentation with short videos Security is a major concern and Apigee provides an easily configurable policy to secure API Quota and rate-limit is again very easy to configure on every API basis It provides various policies to transform the response from one form to another form e.g. JSON to XML or XML to JSON
As a public entity it is hard to say how much ROI we can have. We have yet to create a billing and ROI plan. We are thinking of other ways to create ROI, possibly through data/service barter.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
