As developers, we spend a lot of time developing APIs. Sometimes it’s to expose data that we’ve transformed or to ingest data from other sources. Coincidentally, more and more companies are jumping into the realm of API Management—Microsoft, Google, MuleSoft and Kong all have products now that provide this functionality. With this much investment from the big players in the tech industry, API management is obviously a priority. Now, why would anyone want to use an API Management tool?

The answer is simple: It allows you to create an API Gateway that you can load all your APIs into, providing a single source to query and curate. API Management makes life as an admin, a developer, and a consumer easier by providing everything for you in one package.

Azure API Management

Azure API Management logoWhat does Azure API Management provide? Azure API Management (APIM) is a cloud-based PaaS offering available in both commercial Azure and Azure Government. APIM provides a one-stop-shop for API authority, with the ability to create products, enforce policies, and utilize a robust developer portal.

Not only can API Management integrate seamlessly with your existing Azure infrastructure, but it can also manage APIs that exist on-prem and in other clouds. APIM is also available in both the IL4 and IL5 environments in Azure Government, which allows for extensibility and management for those working in the public sector.

APIM leverages a few key concepts to provide its functionality to you as a developer, including:

  • Products
  • Policies
  • Developer Portal

From providing security to leveraging rate-limiting and abstraction, Azure API Management does it all for API consolidation and governance in Azure. Any API can be ingested, and it gets even easier when APIs follow the OpenAPI Format.

What Are Products?

Products are a layer of abstraction provided inside APIM. Products allow you to create subsets of APIs that are already ingested into the solution—allowing you to overlap the use of APIs while restricting the use of individual collections of APIs. This level of compartmentalization allows you to not only separate your APIs into logical buckets but also enforce rules on these products separately, providing one more layer of control.

Product access is very similar to Azure RBAC—with different groups created inside of the APIM instance. These groups are yet another way for APIM admins to encapsulate and protect their APIs, allowing them to add users already associated to the APIM instance into separate subsets. Users can also be members of multiple groups, so admins can make sure the right people have access to the right APIs stored in their APIM instance.

What Are Policies?

Policies are APIM’s way of enforcing certain restrictions and providing a more granular level of control. There is an entire breadth of policies available in APIM, which range from simply disallowing usage of the API after calling it five times, to authentication, logging, caching, and transformation of requests or responses from JSON to XML and vice versa. Policies are perhaps the most powerful function of APIM and drive the control that everyone wants and need. Policies are written in XML and can be easily edited within the APIM XML Editor. Policies can also leverage C# 7 Syntax, which brings the power of the .NET Framework to your APIM governance.

What Is the Developer Portal?

The Azure API Management Developer Portal is an improved version of the Swagger documentation that’s generated when you use the OpenAPI spec. The Developer Portal provides an area for developers to readily see APIs, products, and associated applications. The Portal also provides sample request bodies (no more guessing API request structures!) and responses, along with code samples in many different languages.

Finally, the portal also allows you to try API calls with customized request bodies and headers, so you have the ability to see exactly what kind of call you want to make. Along with all that functionality, you can also download your own copy of the OpenAPI Spec for your API after it’s been ingested into your instance.

Why Should I Use APIM?

Every business should be using some form of API Management. You’ll be providing yourself a level of control previously not available. By deploying an API Gateway, that extra layer of abstraction allows for much tighter control of your APIs. Once an API has been ingested, APIM provides many additional functionalities.

First, you can match APIs to products, providing a greater level of compartmentalization. Second, you can add different groups to each product, with groups being subsets of users (i.e. Back-end Devs, Billing Devs, etc.). Third, you automatically generate a robust developer portal, which provides all of the functionality of the Swagger portal, but with added features, such as code snippets.  Finally, APIM also has complete integration with Application Insights in commercial Azure, providing access to a world-class logging and visualization tool.

Azure API Management brings power to the user, and no API should be left out.