API / APIGEE Gateway Interview Questions
What is Apigee and what problem does it solve for organisations?
Apigee is Google Cloud's native, full-lifecycle API management platform. It sits between backend services and the clients that consume them, acting as a secure, observable, and policy-enforcing proxy layer. Apigee handles traffic routing, authentication, rate limiting, analytics, developer portal hosting, and the complete lifecycle work of getting an API from design to deprecation.
The core problem it solves: as organisations expose more backend services as APIs -- to partners, mobile apps, third-party developers, and internal consumers -- they face a consistent set of cross-cutting concerns that should not live inside each service:
- Security -- authentication, authorisation, token validation, and protection from abuse
- Traffic management -- rate limiting, quotas, spike arrest, and load balancing
- Observability -- access logs, latency metrics, error rates, and developer analytics
- Mediation -- transforming request/response formats, header manipulation, protocol bridging
- Developer experience -- self-service portals, API discovery, and API product packaging
| Property | Detail |
|---|---|
| Product type | Full-lifecycle API management platform |
| Vendor | Google Cloud |
| Supported protocols | REST, SOAP, GraphQL, gRPC, OpenAPI |
| Deployment models | Apigee (SaaS), Apigee hybrid, Apigee Adapter for Envoy |
| Core unit | API Proxy |
| Policy engine | XML-based declarative policies + JavaScript/Java callouts |
Apigee is one of the four or five names that consistently appear on enterprise API management shortlists alongside WSO2, Kong, MuleSoft, and AWS API Gateway.
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