As part of its campaign to provide greater freedom of choice in the public cloud, Google Inc. is giving customers a new option for managing the application programming interfaces they use to enable web services to communicate with one another.

The search giant today launched a gateway service called Cloud Endpoints that is aimed at making that process easier to regulate. According to the launch announcement, it’s based on a customized version of the widely used NGINX reverse proxy that can process requests with sub-millisecond latency. More advanced tasks are handled using the other management tools in Google’s platform.

When a request is made to an API controlled by Cloud Endpoints, it’s first reviewed by an authentication mechanism that verifies the identity of the sender. Developers can have the evaluation process performed either using Google’s Firebase application automation toolkit or the popular third-party Auth0 service. From there, each API call is recorded by the search giant’s Stackdriver Logging tool, while key operational metrics are displayed in its cloud management console.

If deeper insight is required, developers can pull the information into the Google BigQuery data warehouse to correlate it with metrics from other parts of their deployments. The service is handy for finding elusive performance bottlenecks and other problems that may not be apparent at first glance.

Cloud Endpoints is positioned as a more accessible alternative to Apigee, the API management service that Google acquired last year for $625 million. The new tool enables users to process 2 million API calls per month at no charge and carries a price of $3 per million requests from there. It’s already used by several early adopters, including Qubit Inc., a marketing personalization startup, and an unnamed organization that handles as many as 50 million requests a day.

Image courtesy of Google