APIs available on our developer portal use Apigee as an API gateway. Apigee proxies our API traffic to handle functionality like authorization, authentication, caching, and load balancing, among other things. Our current license with Apigee allows us 8 million API calls per month. This quota has been able to give us a comfortable amount of headroom since we started using Apigee in 2015, but since the start of this academic year, we’ve been getting too close to our 8 million limit (which is a good problem to have!). We don’t expect API traffic to slow down, so we are changing are plan with Apigee to increase our monthly quota. As apart of this upgrade, Apigee is also upgrading our gateway to use better infrastructure which is hosted on Amazon Web Services. Our new agreement with Apigee means that our monthly quota is increased to 300 million calls per month and we are getting a higher runtime SLA.

One downside to this upgrade is an outage required from Apigee. Apigee has done these types of upgrades to its other customers before, so they envision the outage to last 10-45 minutes. We have scheduled this outage on Thursday, November 2nd, at 7:00AM (please see the update below for the new upgrade date). This will be a total outage of all our APIs for api.oregonstate.edu including the development and test environments.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused from this outage, but thank you for bearing with us as we aim to improve our APIs and adapt to increasing traffic.

Update

As of 10:00AM November 2nd, all APIs are back online. The upgrade was unsuccessful for Apigee and they had to rollback the changes they were performing. This upgrade will be performed at a future date and time. Apigee identified the problem that prevented the upgrade and will be addressing it before the next upgrade. We apologize that the outage lasted longer than expected. We will be working with Apigee to make sure the future upgrade causes less interruption for API traffic.

Apigee is going to try the upgrade again on Thursday, November 9th, at 6:00PM. The problem with the previous upgrade attempt was found to be related to access tokens. Apigee was copying access tokens which was slower than normal, so they decided to abort the upgrade. For the upgrade scheduled on November 9th, Apigee is not going to copy access tokens. We decided that since most access tokens expire in an hour or less, skipping access tokens reduces the outage time and risk associated with this upgrade.

Final Update

Apigee successfully completed the upgrade and all API traffic was returned to service at 6:20PM, November 9th. Thanks for bearing with us!