Google has signed a definitive agreement to acquire US-based Apigee, an API management company to enhance its cloud business. A Reuters report pegs the size of the deal at $625 million; Google will pay Apigee’s shareholders $17.40 for each share, added the report. This is Google’s second acquisition in the cloud business space: In July it bought Anvato, a cloud based platform to scale media processing and workflows in the cloud. Apigee offers customized APIs for developers and enable them to build applications around a tailored ecosystem. For example: Pharmaceutical store Walgreens uses Apigee’s API management tools to developed a mobile app that prints photos of prescriptions or medicines specified by customers at stores; the app can also be later used to order refills for the same prescription online. How Apigee will enhance Google’s cloud business This technology will now be integrated in Google’s cloud offerings including Google App Engine, and Google Container Engine—both together provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for hosting web apps on Google managed cloud data centers. “Now, with Apigee’s API management platform, they'll (users) be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs,” Google said in the blog post. In addition, Apigee’s technology will also be used in Kubernetes—an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and managing cloud-hosted applications. This is mainly targeted at enterprise customers as Google mentions that the Kubernetes-Apigee integration will “help enterprises get better control and visibility into how their internal systems talk…
