APIGEE Upgrade and Migrate

Program Objective

Molina Healthcare, a major healthcare provider and administrator in the US, has APIGEE as their API Management Platform. With a keen focus on digital transformation throughout the organization, there is a need to stay current on their API Management Platform, which is key to their systems integration (and data communication) within the organization and with external partners.

This Program deals with upgrading APIGEE from 4.17.01 to 4.19.01.

Additionally, with a bid to leverage cloud infrastructure for operational efficiency and resiliency, APIGEE platform will be migrated to MS Azure Infrastructure (IaaS).

Environment

Molina Healthcare maintains 3 APIGEE planets:

• Labs Planet – Which serves as a sandbox for various developers and testing teams.
• Non-Production Planet – Which servers as a pre-production environment. This planet is a composition of multiple environments, namely:
  • Development
  • QA
  • Staging
• Production Planet – This serves as the production environment, where production-grade data exchange occurs between systems via the APIs deployed on this platform.

All three planets have been upgraded and migrated as part of this program.

Program Execution

 

Upgrade

As part of the Apigee upgrade, the prescribed methodology for ‘Private Cloud Upgrade’ was followed. Since there is no direct upgrade path from version 4.17.01 to 4.19.01, we opted for a two-step process: first upgrading from 4.17.01 to 4.18.01, and then from 4.18.01 to 4.19.01. Each upgrade was followed by a thorough round of validation of the environment and testing of existing APIs to ensure flawless execution.

Migration

As part of APIGEE migration to Azure cloud environment/infrastructure, standard APIGEE prescribed methodology has been followed. Each APIGEE planet which was on-premises was sequentially migrated i.e. Labs, Non-Production and then Production. At a high level, the following steps have been followed:

1. Azure VMs provisioning
2. Firewall rules provisioning, Load Balancer Setup, Backups
3. Installation of APIGEE 4.19.01
4. API Migration using APIGEE migration tool
5. Custom Migration scripts (to migrate environment values)
6. Sanity Check/Smoke Test
7. DNS Switch
8. API Validation (by QA team)

While the existing topology was maintained, Molina Healthcare desired to separate PCI vs Non-PCI infrastructure. We have successfully migrated the APIs in each provisioned zones as part of this program.

Program Benefits

As part of the program execution and implementation, Molina Healthcare realized the following benefits:

• Managing Virtual Hosts from Edge UI.
• New TLS configuration properties in Edge UI.
• OpenAPI v3 support
• RHEL Linux 7.6 support.
• Operational Efficiency on Azure cloud.
• Seamless integration with Azure services.
• Seamless integration with Azure hosted applications.
• Increased performance and throughput.
• Zero-downtime scalability.
• Significant reduction in infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Program Retrospective

During the execution of this program, we have identified several key considerations that must be considered, such as:

• RHEL Linux 7.6 upgrade/install on the VMs – this is imperative for APIGEE 4.19.01 to be successfully upgraded/migrated.
• Ensuring backups are taken frequently – we have witnessed a wipeout of the VMs (due to Azure Availability Set change) after APIGEE install was done. Taking a backup would have reduced the re-install effort.
• Operational: Ensuring appropriate team members are available throughout the process (infrastructure, network support, system administrators, QA etc.)