Amazon API Gateway vs. Azure API Management vs. Azure Traffic Manager

Experienced a lack of available programming languages while working on a minor project. I had to halt the project and wait for it to be added later. It took ages and had a hit on our productivity. It has a centralized management system which helps and an easy interface which helps to manage multiple tasks in case of large-scale operations and projects.

Incentivized

APIM is useful for the standard scenarios:

1) Securing your back-end APIs - If you have a legacy back-end web service that has a basic authentication scheme, you can add some additional security by placing APIM in front, and requiring subscription keys. Leverage your existing firewall to ensure only your APIM instance can communicate with your back-end API, and you've basically added a layer of protection.

2) Lift and shift - there are always going to be clients that don't want to update their clients to use a newer API; in some cases you can make a newer API look like an older one by implementing some complex policies in APIM. You can also do the opposite, making older APIs look new, such as making an XML back-end accept both JSON and XML.

3) Centralizing your APIs - if you've acquired another company and want to make their API set look as if it's a part of the larger whole, APIM is an easy way to provide a consistent front-end interface for developers.

Incentivized

Azure Traffic Manager is a great product, if you have multiple sites hosting similar services (Primary and DR), and you want to ensure that users are directed to the DR in case of a primary datacenter failure, [Azure] Traffic Manager does this very nicely. If you have a service hosted across multiple regions/datacenters and you want to balance the inbound load between the regions, [Azure] Traffic Manager does this very well, of course such scenario would require a database replication or something like Cosmos-DB in the backend [Azure Traffic Manager] is also well suited for inbound traffic with multiple IPs, you can fail-over traffic from one inbound IP to another based on its availability, or if you have multiple internet connections that you want to balance the load across, it does this pretty nicely too.

Incentivized

• API Gateway integrates well with AWS Lambda. This allows us to build a web server in the language and framework of our choice, deploy it as a Lambda function, and expose it through API Gateway.
• API Gateway manages API keys. Building rate limiting and request quota features are not trivial (or interesting).
• API Gateway's pricing can be very attractive for services that are accessed infrequently.

Incentivized

• Easy commissioning of APIs.
• Great policies to control access.
• Easy mock services for testing.

Incentivized

• Performance DNS Load Balancing for Lowest Latency Endpoint to Clients
• Priority-Based DNS Load Balancing to ensure maximum up time for a service
• Geographic-based DNS Load Balancing to force certain clients in certain regions to connect to specific endpoints

Incentivized

• Client certificates are troublesome when trying to attach them to API GW stages.
• Debugging across several services can be difficult when API GW is integrated with Route 53 and another service like Lambda or EC2/ELB.
• Creating internal/private APIs, particularly with custom domains, can be unintuitive.

Incentivized

• Lack of robustness is a bit of an issue. Several other providers offer more options and capabilities, but then, they are lacking in interface ease.
• As with anything Azure, pricing is really hard to stay on top of. I always find that you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get the bill. Having an excellent Azure Administrator can help resolve that.
• Integrating with app services outside of Azure can be a challenge, or at least much more challenging than just using Azure App Services.

Incentivized

• Traffic View is a great feature, but doesn't work very well, sometimes it gets stuck and stops loading traffic view data
• Automatic probing for endpoints sometimes gets stuck too, I would recommend a technique to test the endpoint in real time from Azure Portal
• Traffic View heatmap is buggy and doesn't point correctly to locations
• Traffic View portal doesn't show source countries (Shows coordinates) it would be much more helpful to have coordinates auto-translated to geolocations/countries

Incentivized

It is a great product very reliable and stable for connecting various aws services like we connected with lambda function and it is working very well, never faced any issue after the setup. It also saves out lots of money as well as time after we implemented the automatic ec2 server recovery system

Incentivized

We always had a great experience with the AWS support team. They were always on time and very dependable. It was a good partnership while we worked to resolve our issues.

Incentivized

When we tested Azure API Management at the time, it had serious connectivity issues, it was very unstable, and it needed to do a lot using the command line. Comparing with the AWS solution, which was more mature, and the fact that we have services in use on AWS, we ended up choosing to continue using AWS products. This so as not to run the risk of increasing latency in accesses, and of some functionality not working, due to being developed yet.

Incentivized

Azure APIM vs Amazon API Gateway:

1) Azure APIM was a complete package that included a developer portal.

2) We are very Microsoft centric - so the Microsoft product suite aligned very well with our business needs.

3) It was faster and easier to stand up Azure APIM for testing than it was for the Amazon API Gateway.

Incentivized

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow does what [Azure] Traffic Manager does, however, in Azure Configuration is separated between Azure DNS Zones (For DNS Zone Management) and [Azure] Traffic Manager for DNS Traffic Management and Load Balancing, Route 53 in a unified product for DNS Traffic Management using Traffic Flow and DNS Zone Management. Route 53 does a great job, however, we found it to be a little bit more complex to setup than [Azure] Traffic Manager, Setting up traffic manager is pretty easy even for the first time, and getting the best out of it is relatively simple.

Incentivized

• ROI is negative, you need either to hire them to work with you or spend days/weeks to figure out issues.
• For some of the projects in the end it is not worth it, it is just a "buzz" to use serverless but not practical.
• Service is easy to set up authorization and it is easy to manage.

Incentivized

• We can always think of positive ROI impact on business
• It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs

• Service cost is exceptionally low
• Overall, this product saves a lot of money for the value it provides and it isn't expensive
• It's around half a dollar per million queries, which is truly peanuts, extras may be required if you do advanced configuration
• I can't see any reason why any business wouldn't be using this product, very low investment for a very high return and savings

Incentivized