Azure API Management

Actually most of the work in Projects these days are managed via the use of APIs. However the security and management of APIs is a key aspect which is being done through Azure API Management or shortly APIM. Mostly it is used across the organizational levels. Through Azure API Management, we have mostly integrated different kinds of APIs right from Agricultural based APIs to Banking and Finance data APIs.

Wherever we want to maintain the security of the API and the ingredient data is very confidential, we must use this service. Also, if we would like to manage a large number of API at one go, we must use it. However, for few general APIs, we can avoid the Azure API Management use due to the overall cost strategy.

We use it for letting teams access synchronous services and microservices both for internal and external network users. It's extremely simple to make an API available. We can build infrastructure and APIs using Terraform.

The range of policies that enable the APIs to loosely couple it with security, rate limit, retry, etc. are good. We can easily tie authentication mechanisms to external and other internal services without having to modify the backend.

We are lightly managing and pushing out a few APIs to internal customers using Azure API Management. We are exploring pushing them out to a few of our external partners, but have not done so yet. It is a small catalog of APIs we are managing, but they work well and are easier to keep track of with this tool. It helps keep our policies in order and therefore users know what to expect.

If you are an Azure Cloud shop, or are moving in that direction, this is a great tool to start using. You can try with a few small APIs; we began with building some internal APIs that allow us to connect some of our SQL DBs to the Azure Maps service, and we had great luck and things have been running smoothly for six months now. We are expanding the use internally and looking to expand further to external partners as well.

API Management is being used to externalize, modernize, and secure our API set. As part of our strategy to open up and integrate more with our clients and patients we chose to leverage API Management as our main gateway to health data and submission of orders. API management takes away a lot of the headaches associated with externalizing web services and API sets. Things like versioning, enabling both XML and JSON even though the back-end service is only XML, providing a developer portal and subscription keys... there is a lot more that makes this well worth the costs.