Google has agreed to acquire application programming interface (API) specialist Apigee in a deal worth roughly $625 million.

The purchase, announced today, would make Apigee's cloud-based API platform into a service available for Google Cloud Platform customers. And it would give Google some more features-based ammunition in the competition against other public clouds, primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Google is offering $17.40 per share for the company, a premium of about 7 percent over yesterday's closing price for Apigee (which was trading at $17.41 at press time.)

Apigee offers a platform for creating and managing APIs. Often, an API is used as the conduit between a company's core software and the outside world. If someone wants to write an application that takes advantage of that core software — reading data from Google Maps, for instance — an API will allow them to do that without having to peek into the core software itself.

Google is already pretty good at making and managing APIs. The acquisition is aimed more at customers of Google Cloud Platform, letting them provide that API conduit into their cloud-based applications.

The companies are also touting this merger as a way to make the cloud more suitable for mission-critical applications. Apigee's platform can be used to monitor applications for usage trends, traffic bottlenecks, and errors.

Apigee went public in April 2015 at $17 per share but quickly tumbled, falling as low as $5.45 in February 2016. The share price has been steadily ramping up since then.

The company hasn't yet reported earnings for its fourth quarter, which ended July 31. That release is scheduled for Sept. 14.