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This article provides guidance for Partners to build an Application Integration demo or POC environment, and manage their free tier and credits
What’s changed from Apigee?
Partners often use free 60 day Apigee Eval Orgs for Demos, POCs or internal sandboxes. Application Integration has a different model that aligns more with GCP products: It provides a free tier for evaluation, and PAYG pricing for usage beyond the free tier.
Free Tier and Credits
Application Integration has a Free tier that includes enough resources for small experiments or demos. As of publishing this article, that includes:
- Up to 400 integration executions per month
- Up to 20 GiB data processed per month
- First 2 connection nodes for Google services (caveat: 3rd Party connectors i.e. SFTP, SalesForce have no free tier)
GCP Credits:
- If you go over the free tier, it will be charged to your GCP billing account at these rates.
- Any GCP resources you create (BigQuery, Cloud Run, etc) have their own free tier and/or pricing rates which we will not cover in this guide.
- All GCP Partners have access to GCP Sandbox Credits to support evaluation, demos, etc. Talk to your GCP Alliance team, or if your company has not yet received these Partner credits, apply here.
Setting up your environment
Set up a Google Cloud Project in your Organization or choose an existing Project. Give your team members the IAM permissions to manage your environment. For Application Integration this means roles/integrations.integrationAdmin, roles/integrations.integrationEditor. You should also consider the permissions to create other GCP resources if you will be using BigQuery, Cloud Run, etc. If in doubt, ask your GCP Alliance team for help.
Enable Application Integration, and set up your demo/sandbox. Follow the instructions here to activate Application Integration, and create a sample integrations or quickstart example to verify that it is working
Create your first demo! Pick a realistic use case that will resonate with your customer. If you need some inspiration see demo videos from our team: Tyler's Application Integration + Salesforce demo, Scott's medical invoice processing demo. We also have a growing repository of technical samples here and in this repository - these are useful jumpstarts for a demo.
Consider Automation: While Application Integration has a nice UI, if you expect to promote your demo/POC code to a customer environment this is a perfect moment to read and implement @ssvaidyanathan 's guidance on CI/CD automation for Application Integration
Monitoring Costs
- For larger or more complex POCs, you can estimate costs in the GCP Pricing Calculator. Be sure to check the Billing Console periodically to check that you are staying within your free tier or expected budget.
- The most likely cause of cost overages will be extra Connector nodes left running while demos are not in use. 3rd party connector nodes have no free tier and are charged at $0.70/hour, so be sure to Suspend or Delete Connectors when not in use for sandbox / demo / experiments. You can also automate this, see @AldoMeneses86 's article on automation for cost savings
- If you are using GCP resources for your demos (Cloud Run, Databases etc), monitor the costs of these through Cloud Billing as well and apply the appropriate cost controls.
Share your Feedback, Share your demos!
I hope that is helpful to get you started. Use the comments to ask questions, add helpful tips, or share links to your own demo videos
