Microsoft Azure API Management Reviews

• Monitoring: It gives us a detailed overview of how clients are using the API and it allows us to see the consumption trends in real-time.
• Policies: It allows us to control and enrich the API behavior without the need to make code changes
• The documentation and configuration of APIs.

Internally, we use this product to give our employees a catalog of all the APIs that we implemented over the years. They get detailed documentation on how to use those APIs and can develop their own solutions on top.

Security could be improved.

I have used this solution for a year.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give the technical support team a rating of eight out of 10 .

The setup was straightforward, setting up a basic API management portal is only a few clicks in the Azure Portal. Once it is set up, the APIs can directly be added by just importing the Swagger file.

The developer and standard pricing tiers of Azure API Management are very competitive compared to other products. If a customer wants to expose their internal APIs to the Azure API Management Portal, then they would require a VPN connection which requires the Premium Pricing tier. This can be expensive and we currently recommend our customers to not use a VPN connection, i.e., if they don’t need additional Premium features; and we suggest they expose their APIs publicly through other technologies such as the relay services.

Learn how policies work since this is where the real added value of Azure API Management is.

• API gateway features
• AD integration
• Access management capabilities
• Usage plans
• Quotas for APIs, etc.

It is a simple and effective way to enable micro-services architecture. The Standard Tier is cost effective.

• An IaaS option is needed. The SaaS option limited our requirement, as we wanted more control on our data, and integration with our virtual LAN. Integration with our VLAN was possible only with the premium version and expensive gateway controllers.
• PCI compliance

I evaluated it for one month.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. However, I evaluated other API gateways and shortlisted ForgeRock - OpenAM/OpenIG, because it has an IaaS option.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward; excellent documentation.

The Standard Tier is cost effective.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated NGINX, Apigee, and ForgeRock (OpenAM/OpenIG).

Code impact: Required services to import Swagger library.

Being SaaS, if you are running services on IaaS, communication between APIM and your services will be through the public internet (if that’s a cause of concern).

APIM was available in classic mode only (as of April 2016). Our infrastructure was ARM. Connectivity was complex and expensive.

The ability to manage user access to given API operations.

• Visibility on user usage analytics
• Set policies across API operations, which control the type of access (CORS, JSONP)
• The ability to piece together an array of services into one proxied service. Where I can create consistency to both usage and documentation

We were securely able to offer services to external third parties to securely consume within a relatively short amount of time.

• Versioning of API operations (which I have heard is in the pipeline)

• Easy exporting of configurations from the Administrator portal.

I've used it for around six months or so.

I did follow the prescribed steps to export our Test subscription setup to import into a production subscription environment, but I was unable to achieve the export within the short amount of time I had to achieve it. So to get around the issue, I just manually configured it in the production environment as part of the release.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Didn't use them.

10/10, as our Microsoft account manager arranged direct contact with members of the API Management Team.

No previous solution used.

Pretty easy. The online documentation is very thorough.

In-house implementation.

The product probably saved us at least two to four sprints worth of extra work, which would not have achieved the quality, which this PAS provides us, out of the box.

Nothing. Day to Day costs are very minimal, tens of dollars a month or so depending on peaks of usage.

No. I was evaluating Azure PAS offerings and producing proof of concept solutions just before the project kicked off.

Definitely check it out. The documentation is plentiful and it is pretty easy to setup and have something going within an hour or so.