StepZen and Google Cloud Form Strategic Partnership to Provide Full Lifecycle API Management for GraphQL APIs
Anant JhingranFor more than two decades REST APIs have been the standard way that enterprise data and backends get exposed to external, partner and internal applications. Google Cloud’s Apigee is a leader in API Management, allowing users to manage REST APIs — define rate-limits, enforce authentication and authorization, block clients that attempt to misuse an API, and ensure APIs work seamlessly as they are updated. StepZen is very excited to partner with Google Cloud to help extend these powerful API Management capabilities to GraphQL APIs.
GraphQL is fast emerging as a new paradigm for building developer-friendly and flexible APIs. It supports application developers requesting exactly the data they want from any backend system, including databases, microservices, and first and third-party APIs. GraphQL API providers then face the challenge to build and manage GraphQL APIs as well as REST.
By enabling easy connection to any backend data source, GraphQL APIs built on StepZen leverage an enterprise’s REST and database investments, and provide an easier consumption model for all enterprise and third-party data. StepZen is an enterprise GraphQL provider, built on a foundation of low-code building blocks and connectors that speed up the API development, but more importantly, deliver performance, security and scale that enterprise applications need. Furthermore, GraphQL APIs, in the end, are just APIs, and need API management too.
This partnership with Google Cloud will enable developers to create GraphQL APIs in StepZen and seamlessly add API management using Apigee. With Apigee’s GraphQL policy and StepZen extensions, developers can better protect their GraphQL API with AuthN/AuthZ, and get schema validation and visibility into GraphQL operations in Apigee analytics. StepZen is software-as-a-Service and runs on Google Cloud, so there is no infrastructure for developers or enterprises to manage.
We are excited to partner with StepZen because together we can provide the best approach for developers to build GraphQL and REST APIs - a set of building blocks, assembled together, and delivered as-a-service. This partnership provides Google Cloud customers ways to easily build, deploy and run REST and GraphQL APIs and gain visibility from one single dashboard,
said Vikas Anand, Head of Products, Business Application Platform, Google Cloud.
StepZen is proud to partner with Google Cloud to enable next-generation API Management for GraphQL. StepZen brings an innovative approach to declarative, low code assembly of GraphQL APIs — there are no resolvers to write, no servers to maintain. Our partnership with Google Cloud brings the familiar world of REST APIs and API Management delivered-as-a-service to the world of GraphQL. With this integration, companies can build and manage both GraphQL and REST APIs in a seamless way on Google Cloud.
Where To Go From Here
The integration is available now. Learn more in the How to Manage your GraphQL APIs with Apigee & StepZen blog.
Check out the GitHub repo github.com/apigee/stepzen, which contains a script that makes it easy to spin up a StepZen hosted GraphQL endpoint fronted with an Apigee depoyed proxy (for Apigee Hybrid or Apigee X).
Give it a try and let us know what you think - free signups for StepZen and Apigee API Management.
