We’ve recently supported an organization who wanted to expose its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) backend behind Apigee X. A quite common architecture, which most of the users delivering modern web applications on Google Cloud tend to build upon. In this scenario, Google’s API gateway, Apigee, receives requests and performs L7 routing, redirecting you to the correct backend application, running as one or more pods on GKE.

By now, you’ve probably interacted with a customer service chatbot at some point. However, many of those interactions may have left a lot to be desired. Modern consumers generally expect more than a simple bot that answers questions with predefined answers—they expect a virtual agent that can solve their problems.