IBM API Management vs. Microsoft Azure

If you are truly using IBM API Management for an API gateway, you will be ok. if you start trying to build custom scripts to transform messages complex in nature, it will soon become unmanageable.

In terms of cloud computing, Microsoft Azure is the only comprehensive result the company offers. Regardless of how big or small an organization is, it can make use of this system. As a cyber-security professional, this is your best option for data management. A business that wants to minimize capital expenditures can use Microsoft Azure. Many Microsoft services accept it. People with little or no knowledge of cloud computing may find it impossible. It isn’t the solution for companies that don’t want to risk having only one platform and infrastructure vendor.

• Import APIs - We have an existing inventory of APIs and services, so having an easy import process was required. IBM provides the ability to import Swagger so the process was quick and easy.
• Service Offerings - Can create plans to control various model offerings for varying clients depending on the need. You are not locked into a tier structure and can customize if a need arises.
• API Usage - visibility into the use of an API with a wealth of reporting information allows you to support an API from a production use to trending and forecasting any future growth.

• Azure simply provides end to end life cycle. Starting from the development to automated deployment, you will find [a] bunch of options. Custom hook-points allow [integration] on-premise resources as well.
• Excellent documentation around all the services make it really easy for any novice. Overall support by [the] community and Azure Technical team is exceptional.
• BOT Services, Computer Vision services, ML frameworks provide excellent results as compare to similar services provided by other giants in the same space.
• Azure data services provide excellent support to ingest data from different sources, ETL, and consumption of data for BI purpose.

Incentivized

• Troubleshooting deployment pipeline - identifying issues with your api based on restrictions through a deployment pipeline is difficult. If a quality assurance environment is less stringent than a production environment, making sure your api is accessible and configured appropriately is tough.
• Code level scripting is limited to javascript and xslt. so if any complex fanning needs to occur, you are limited in tooling.
• Administration is more cumbersome than it needs to be. There are roles/profiles that are defined, but to use a group email for the approval or use of an api needs to managed better. A more thorough thought process needs to be defined - which I think IBM is tackling as an improvement.

• In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
• Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
• Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.

Incentivized

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

Microsoft Azure's overall usability has been better than expected. Often times vendors promise the world, only to leave you with a run-down town. Not the case with our experience. From an implementation perspective, all went perfect, and from the user-facing experience we have had no technical issues, just some learning curve issues that are more about "why" than "how"

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

Support is easy with all the knowledge base articles available for free on the web. Plus, if you have a preferred status you can leverage their concierge support to get rapid response. Sometimes they’ll bounce you around a lot to get you to the right person, but they are quite responsive (especially when you are paying for the service). Many of the older Microsoft skills are also transferable from old-school on-prem to Azure-based virtual interfaces.

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

There are a lot of similarities between Apigee Edge and IBM API Management. Some of the differences at the time of this posting is... 1) IBM APIM/C integrates better with other products. Dynatrace is used to track API and service specifics with the ability to offload those statistics for operational reporting. 2) If you are evolving from DataPower, IBM API Management is a logical choice to support additional REST APIs. 3) Generating keys is simple. Integration of those keys with a secure data vault is easy as well for your consumer.

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

Incentivized

• Centralizing on an API management platform was imperative. Being able to support SOAP UIs as well as REST APIs was required. Because of the tooling, service inventory and provisioning can be managed - regardless of the pricing and cost structures are used.
• Constructing plans that provide tiering options based on rate limits help in onboarding new consumers. The lesser cost in onboarding through an API gateway outweighs the cost of modifying/configuring an API to handle multiple clients.
• Defining guidance and onboarding practices while rolling out the product also helps in the adoption, reference architecture, and governance that can save your company money.

• Brings down Capex to customers.
• Some of the built-in security features of DDoS Basic protection that comes with VNET on Azure or even WAF on AGW brings huge advantages to customers.
• Hybrid benefits for those who have software assurance can save even more costs by moving to Azure.

Incentivized