GCP Apigee API Management

## Challenge

In addition to ifeel's traditional services for individuals (B2C), they have a growing business on well-being services for companies and their employees (B2B). This B2B service grew around 70% during the pandemic lock-down.

To implement B2B services they must deal with a complex onboarding process of the company's end-users on the ifeel's platform. So far, the process was done through file transfers between the customer company and ifeel, and that required all kind of manual controls, to guarantee the accuracy and the security of the process.

That onboarding process implied a heavy human workload that was not scalable and could lead to errors, incidences and delays. And all of this, would compromise the quality of the customer experience, and therefore it would impact the business of ifeel.

## Use Case & Solution

ifeel applications are running on AWS infrastructure, but we found that a best-in-class API management solution, like Apigee, could facilitate the new B2B user onboarding process, isolating all the complexity. And this is what we proposed to ifeel.

To implement that approach, it was necessary to create a set of users with the required permissions to operate within the Google Cloud infrastructure, following the best practice of assigning minimal privileges. Next, a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with a public subnet was created. This subnet is hosting the connection to the Apigee Organization through a load balancer that receives and distributes requests among two Compute Engine instances and communicates with the Apigee execution environment.

Finally, Apigee has the mechanisms to expose the different endpoints that ifeel has currently decided, redirecting calls from Google Cloud to AWS.

## Benefits

The new solution based on Apigee reduces the integration process with clients from days to hours. And in addition it allows ifeel to reach new important clients that would not have accepted working with the previous onboarding method.

Apigee is providing ifeel with the ability to offer its services to partners and enables a smooth and easy integration with the platforms of its clients. This agility allows ifeel to develop the backend with a significantly reduced time to market, facilitating business growth at a faster pace.

The new onboarding process using Apigee will allow ifeel to avoid the human factor that was needed before, making it more efficient and scalable. Also possible mistakes made in the onboarding process are avoided with this new method.

## Final Thoughts

All in all, Magic Beans' implementation of Apigee has been a game-changer for ifeel. It's facilitating their exponential growth, modernizing a non-scalable onboarding mechanism, with a much more open, elastic, and adaptable one, that is supporting both current and future business needs.