The cutting-edge, cloud-native application everyone lusts after these days often includes these ingredients: microservices, containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) and Kubernetes, a platform to orchestrate those containers. That none are exactly child’s play to manage may explain why many companies still run lots of legacy software. Can application program interface management technology get them all to shake hands and work together?

Google Cloud Platform owns Apigee Corp., which provides API management and predictive analytics software. This week, Apigee made an announcement with Kubernetes and Istio, an open-source service mesh for microservices.

“Apigee is making it now possible for you to have all the tools that we’ve given you for managing your APIs — for getting your mobile apps to talk to your cloud services and all of that — now it’s also going to apply to these new microservices that you’re building,” said Ed Anuff (pictured, left), director of product management at Google Cloud. “What we announced this week at the show with Kubernetes and Istio are new ways for people to build software and deploy it in new distributed fashions.”

APIs are how software talks to software, Anuff explained. Just as Apigee facilitates communication among APIs, it brings new ways to enable communication among microservices, Kubernetes, Istio, etc.

Anuff and Chuck Knostman (pictured, right), vice president of information technology at T-Mobile USA Inc. spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. They discussed the announcement and the scale and modernization that containers and microservices enable. (* Disclosure below.)

Netting the microservices swarm

This week’s announcement is in response to popular demand from many Apigee customers — like Knostman. T-Mobile has been an Apigee customer for four years to manage over 200 internal APIs.

“Over last two years, we’ve really been focused on the microservice layers, writing cloud-native applications,” Knostman said. Apigee’s hook-in to Istio is excellent news, since it will grant T-Mobile a way to manage all those microservices, he added.

Many enterprises need to deliver new apps, but much of their data is locked in legacy silos, Anuff explained. They can leverage Apigee, containers, Kubernetes, etc., to build new apps with legacy data without chucking the legacy systems — no need to apologize for them.

“Don’t even just think about it as this thing that you somehow have to drag along. Think about how you actually can amplify it, because it’s been the source of your business for so long,” Anuff concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next event. (* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE