APIGEE Pay-As-You-Go
APIGEE Pay-As-You-GO
Google Apigee announced a few weeks ago a new possibility to use apigee in a different way, pay as you go, not only under licensing model.
Note that Pay-As-You-Go is only for ApigeeX and not Apigee hybrid deployment.
Apigee architecture distinguishes between the management plan and the runtime plan.
The management plan is where you configure the settings, develop your proxies and access to monitoring features.
A brief story
A few months ago, the only way to have an apigee is to buy a license from apigee.
You still have the possibility to have an evaluation license for initial test and POC.
This new offer is more heterogeneous with Google Cloud services and it is another step to be part of Google Cloud services.
Pay as you go Vs License commitment
Pay as you go
The pay as you go model lets companies, especially Google Cloud customers, to set-up apigee in a few clicks when all prerequisites are fulfilled (GCP project created, a VPC and IP CIDR ranges are defined,…).
Behind the scene, Google Apigee will provision on your behalf some GCP resources like Global Load Balancer to expose externally your APIs, Egress, Number of nodes where Apigee policies are executed xxxxxx
These resources will be charged as any other GCP resources.
These resources are:
- APIGEE gateway nodes: is a Kubernetes cluster where API traffic is executed in message processors, used per Minute.
- API analytics: the total number of API analysed by APIGEE runtime per month will be charged
- Network usage: all network resources used: Egress, Load Balancer, reserved IP addresses, …
To the above resources, you will be charged if any additional resources are used like VPN, interconnect, Cloud Armor, … any GCP resources that can be used to make your APIGEE installation more reliable, secure, fault tolerant, …
When you adopt the PAYG, you MUST follow your billing as you do for any other GCP service because for long-term usage, it can be more expensive than the licensing commitments.
If you are in the license commitment, Apigee will not charge you for all GCP components that are mandatory for Apigee execution.
License commitment
If you are in the license commitment, Apigee will not charge you for all GCP components that are mandatory for Apigee execution.
However, any additional GCP resources used like cloud Armor, VPN if you want to have a private access to your on premise API, will be charged.
COST
As an approach, I recommend the use of PAYG pricing model, if you want to discover and POC Apigee to have an idea of its many features.
Also for startups and compagnies where API is a new concepts or if they have a low number of API with a low number of calls, to start with PAYG.
However for compagnies having API Programs with ambitious objectives, with millions of calls per-year, PAYG model could be more expansive in a long term usage.
I recommend before choosing any one of these model, to refer to the online GCP pricing calculator, that allow you to have an idea for the coast.
