Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as
Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva,
Cloudflare or
Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
Read full review Pros Easy commissioning of APIs. Great policies to control access. Easy mock services for testing. Read full review Content delivery across all continents Web & media acceleration Web application firewall Backend geo-availability Reporting & access metrics Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Better control over origin caching Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management TLS & Cipher Control Faster publishing or change updates Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 .
Read full review It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including
Akamai , Verizon, and
Cloudflare . They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
Read full review Return on Investment We can always think of positive ROI impact on business It helps to easily facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of our APIs Read full review AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation. It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth. Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%. Read full review ScreenShots