Azure API Management vs. Swagger Open Source, supported by SmartBear

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

To my opinion Swagger Open Source is a very good tool to quickly produce an api documentation, that how I use it.Swagger can also produce an open api file to generate an api for our application server (Inersystems Iris) but we don't use this functionality for now. We plan to use more Swagger features in the future.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Produce documentation
• user interface to create api definition
• reusability of data description

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

• for me the UI can be more simple
• too many functionnalities when just want to produce doc, can be a separate app
• A french documentation will be apreciated

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

We use swagger only to generate the API documentation, for testing the APIs, we use Postman. We don't find an other tools for producing API documentation in web pages and also in pdf files. Postman is a good complement for testing APIs on InterSystems IRIS (a powerful application server and DB manager) which implements these APIs.

Incentivized

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

• Less time to produce our documentation
• Documentation can be accessed online, this is a plus for our customers and partners
• Great tools to communicate with other project actors

Incentivized