Microsoft Azure API Management Reviews

Azure API Management is an API gateway that can be used for different purposes, for example, to monetize APIs. We also use it for logging and security purposes such as performing authorization.

Azure API Management cuts out a lot of concerns that developers have. Developers can leave concerns like authorization, authentication, tokens, or any data shaping layer for their APIs to the API gateway or APM service. They can then focus on creating APIs and functionality that matter for the business.

Support for GraphQL could be better. We work with different standards, but at the moment, it only supports GraphQL as a specification. However, support for GraphQL, which is a different communication specification, needs to improve.

I have been using it for at least six to seven years. It is a cloud service, so it is the latest version from Microsoft.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. You can add more computing power to your APM gateway. It also gives you the ability to have VNet integrations with your on-prem. It is one of the leading products in the API management space.

It is not just software for users but software to handle requests. For example, for a B2C e-commerce store, all requests that users make from within the store pass through this API gateway. So it is defined by the number of requests to the API gateway, not by the number of actual users who use it. If you look at the number of requests, it would be a lot from all the different systems we have within Pampers.

The support for the GraphQL standard could be better. But in general, the support falls under the micro agreement you have with Microsoft. We personally have not encountered any specific issues with regard to contacting Microsoft support because something isn't working. But I believe this would fall under your enterprise agreement with Microsoft.

The initial setup is straightforward. Setting up an instance of Azure API Management in the cloud is as simple as setting up Azure. It would probably take around 30 minutes to spin up the service, and you can use it. However, using the gateway in your projects is an ongoing process. If you just want to set up a gateway, it will probably be quick and easy.

When it comes to the deployment process, it's a cloud solution, so you can use infrastructure as code using Azure Visor or ARM templates or follow different infrastructure support solutions to be able to deploy the solution on your own public cloud subscription.

You would need knowledge of Azure to deploy and maintain it in the IT room. Depending on your model, if you have different integrations with, for example, on-prem integration, or network-level integration with your on-prem network, it will be a bit more complex than it is.

ROI depends on how you see the value it adds to your APIs. If you have a strategy where you monetize your API, you can create ROI attempts. Most of the time, where we work in companies, it is more of an internal policy or security guidance that we need to have an API gateway, especially for purposes like spike testing or different policies. So we haven't done something like an ROI analysis on the API gateway.

The pricing model depends on how you use it. There are different tiers of API management: a standard tier, a developer tier, and a premium tier, and each of these tiers will have different features. I think the premium tier can start somewhere around 2000 euros a month. 

The developer tier is free to use, but the standard tier could also be around 500 euros a month. So there are solutions that are not that cheap, and the cost would increase with the additional features you want. The more enterprise-level features you go to, the more expensive it gets.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

API management is a solution that anyone with a public-facing endpoint or an API should consider. Multiple APM solutions are in the market, like Google's Apigee, Azure API Management, and others. They can be expensive, so it depends on your API's value and the financial loss you could encounter in case of security attacks. These different aspects should be considered when using an API management gateway.

Our primary use case for Microsoft Azure API Management is as a gateway for all API management within our tech environment. It serves as a basic part of our DevOps toolchain.

Microsoft Azure API Management is a basic part of our DevOps toolchain.

Microsoft Azure API Management serves as a gateway for all API management within our tech environment and is a basic part of our DevOps toolchain. We utilize it for control and monitoring, particularly for the security aspects of our APIs. 

It provides easy integration within the Azure environment and with third-party SaaS applications, like integrating our point of sale system and our loyalty system under Mastercard.

Microsoft Azure API Management could be improved by enhancing the visual editor of the development portal. Considering that everything is moving towards low code or no code, having a management or development portal with a more intuitive visual editor would be beneficial.

I have used the solution for two to three years.

I rate the stability of Microsoft Azure API Management as nine out of ten. We have not encountered significant stability issues.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft Azure API Management as nine out of ten, indicating that it is quite scalable.

Microsoft support has greatly improved, with resolutions being fast depending on the severity of the ticket raised. I am very satisfied with the support provided by Microsoft.

Positive

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure API Management is straightforward, and I would rate the ease of setup as seven out of ten.

Azure API Management is priced reasonably. The license costs about $150 per month.

We did not evaluate any other API management solutions, as our focus was more on integration platforms.

API management is a crucial component when building an enterprise's integration platform. Microsoft Azure API Management is a good tool, especially when there are many workloads and resources within the Azure environment. 

I recommend using this tool, and I would rate it eight out of ten.

Microsoft Azure API Management is used in our organization to support the API lifecycle. 

It's a valuable tool for API lifecycle management. Another Azure offering is API gateway, which is used to enable the APIs, publish them for internal or external customers, API scaling and other typical use cases. 

Microsoft Azure API Management also has security or threshold features that monitor and control API access through a subscription-based model. 

Documentations for implementing certain product features are very difficult to find. Information regarding some features of Microsoft Azure API Management cannot be found through searching on the Internet; it can be understood, discovered, and learned hands-on while using the solution. Documentations for the product should include examples of implementation. 

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for four years. 

It's a highly stable product. 

Microsoft Azure API Management can be easily scaled. 

Users can contact customer support whenever there are any issues with the product's stability and features.  But in our company, we never faced any issues with the product for which we had to seek help from the support team. The documentation from Microsoft helps our company to solve issues on our own. 

Microsoft Azure API Management can be easily deployed. But if you want the API pipelines to associate with the API codes, sometimes it can be challenging and the need to write custom code might arise before the solution's deployment. The Azure DevOps pipelines are not straightforward, just like some other Azure services.

The deployment time depends upon the service availed and the artifacts, including API, policy file, and other integrations. Each API deployment takes around five minutes with Microsoft Azure API Management. The deployment duration majorly depends upon the ideal pipeline building and its configuration. A team of professionals is required for the solution's deployment and maintenance. When a maintenance need arises with the product, a professional can spend half a day implementing it. 

The ROI depends upon the purpose of adopting Microsoft Azure API Management in the first place. For basic usage like API and gateway management and publishing, in that case the product's ROI will be high.

Proper configuration of the solution, implementation strategy and correct scaling tier selection are other factors that influence the ROI. For instance, if you avail yourself of a higher tier of scalability than required and there are only a few users of your API, the ROI might not be satisfying. 

The product can seem very costly if the use case for Microsoft Azure API Management demands high usage and scalability. I would rate the pricing a six out of ten. It's an expensive solution. 

When Microsoft Azure API Management is compared with IBM's competitor product, I would always choose Microsoft Azure API Management because of its user-friendliness, easy integrations with other Azure tools and other extensive features. 

The availing of API protection features depends upon the customer requirements of our organization. If customers want the API to be secure and restrict accessibility then a subscription model is often integrated into the API where users will gain access to certain services upon payment.

If a customer will be dealing with sensitive data through their API, then only a few individuals will have access which is implemented through Microsoft Azure API Management. I would overall rate the product an eight out of ten.

I would advise others to check the documentation first as it allows you to test the product even before purchasing. Superior technical experts are not needed to operate Microsoft Azure API Management. It's an excellent learning product as one doesn't need to buy a license to start using Microsoft Azure API Management. 

We have a couple of use cases for this  product. It's fully cloud-native and can handle telco distribution for end-to-end distribution management. Five or six years ago, we made a  fantastic product with microservices. I was responsible for rolling it out for a large telco in Qatar. They had no distribution or end-to-end visibility or platform. So we helped them to move to a cloud platform for their entire distribution and operation. The beauty of that product is when you look at the telco distribution standpoint your maybe five or ten thousand merchant ecosystem will be connected to that platform. It helps with generating several transactions in a minute or second. And it gives that kind of scalability in the back end. 

The other use case was for banking transactions. If you have your core banking platform that is legacy, if a user wants to bring in a lot of additional alternatives, they need to have some kind of a platform for enhancements. We made a cloud to bring some kind of their operations to the cloud. We made a transaction platform for them so that their merchants could access transactions.

The API management is very good. You have sophisticated dashboards that help you to understand what's really going on - in addition to whatever security layer that you can bring on top of that. It is easy to manage front and backend APIs.

You can put on your own security layer so that you know only the authorized people are accessing your back-end systems through the gateway. In addition to that, you have sophisticated dashboards and reporting for storage logs or logging. That is quite useful, specifically in the banking sector. 

You can limit items by parameters such as geography or private VPMs. 

You have different pricing tiers and pricing is based depending on the traffic. You can go to basic pricing if you like. Depending on your traffic, you have licensing options.

Microsoft manages everything so you can focus on building applications and deploying them.

The platform components are quite interesting. 

I'm not sure if there are certain areas needed for improvement. I haven't explored its shortcomings. So far, the requirements have been met.

Maybe the customization could be a bit better. 

My team found difficulty in migrating APIs from one platform to this platform. We could export and import properly. We made a complete API for a UAT environment, and when we moved the APIs, we ran into issues. 

They don't have a standard local IP. They only have a public IP.

I've used the solution for six to eight years or so. 

I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. It is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales well. I'd rate it ten out of ten. It's easy to expand as needed. 

We have both medium-sized and enterprise-level customers. 

Technical support has been fine. We are happy with their level of support. 

Positive

I have worked with other competing products, such as Apigee and AWS.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. I'd rate the ease of deployment eight out of ten.

The provisioning takes a couple of minutes. Then you need to do some programming. 

The pricing is reasonable. I'd rate the cost in terms of affordability seven out of ten. 

The premium tier is too expensive for medium-sized organizations. However, the local IP only is offered at the premium tier. 

I did not compare this solution to others since I was promoting Microsoft at the time. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

People should explore API management. You do get full control of your API, and from a security standpoint, you have a good understanding of the touchpoints and far more control of your traffic. You know who is accessing your services. Even if a company has legacy systems, it should have an API gateway in front of its legacy systems.

We went with Microsoft since we were Microsoft partners.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We have several layers in our infrastructure. Some of our layers are more connector-based and interfacing with our systems of record and outsource service providers. Right now, we use Microsoft Azure API Management for that. We're now deciding what to use for the process layer, which is more orchestration and data-mapping-based.

If you were truly a .NET shop and truly Microsoft cloud-centric, this is the most cloud-native offering, and there are some benefits to that. It's really easy to use for simple passthrough APIs. It feels more modern and compatible with people with .NET skill sets, and that's a strong selling point.

The solution's data mapping and orchestration are very code-intensive or require callouts to external systems. They seem suboptimal for the more complex use cases.

A simple installation is very easy, and I rate it ten out of ten. However, it goes to the other extreme when you try to do complex use cases, like orchestration, aggregation, and data mapping. For such scenarios, I rate the installation a five out of ten because of the code intensity and maintenance you would incur.

The solution appears cheaper because it's a cloud SaaS model. Its benefit is that you can use a small amount, and it'll appear very cheap. However, once you scale up to your full volume, it'll be more expensive because it'll incorporate a bunch of different services that are holistically more expensive than the alternative.

There are around ten key security characteristics I look for in a solution. On the surface, my analysis so far seems to indicate that Microsoft Azure API Management has the ability to deliver on those parameters. Given the close relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, we hope the solution will evolve more quickly and incorporate AI more fully, but we don't know for sure.

Our goal is to create a composable financial institution. We are trying to get developers not to be the bottleneck anymore but to be more agile, to grow market share, and to grow national reach. To do all those things, you need very agile, world-class APIs. There are ways to make both work for that. We'll have to evaluate which one is the shorter path.

I would recommend the solution for cloud-native Microsoft .NET shops with simple API requirements. However, I would not recommend it for multi-cloud, larger shops with more diverse or complicated use cases.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

We are using Microsoft Azure API Management to host APIs.

The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure API Management are the easy configuration and deployment with automation.

There is a limitation of 32 kb of data in the APIs. Having the limitation increase would be a benefit.

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for approximately four years.

This is the best service we have used within Azure and it has high availability.

I rate the stability of Microsoft Azure API Management a ten out of ten.

The scalability of Microsoft Azure API Management is great. We only have some issues with the high costs.

We have approximately 100 people using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft Azure API Management a ten out of ten.

We have a dedicated team that supports us from Microsoft. It is excellent.

I rate the support from Microsoft Azure API Management a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have not used other similar solutions.

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure API Management is straightforward. However, we had an issue with the DSTV upgrade. It has its own logic of what to decide. 

The full implementation process of the solution takes time, approximately six hours.

To deploy Microsoft Azure API Management, we utilize TerraForm to incorporate modules that cover all departments. These modules have already been created, so we simply provide the necessary parameters and execute the pipeline. Consequently, we do not rely on the Azure portal for this process and instead rely solely on Azure automation.

I rate the initial setup of Microsoft Azure API Management a nine out of ten.

The solution is highly expensive. Our customers worry about the costs. The price should be a lot less. 

We are using the premium license.

I rate the price of Microsoft Azure API Management a seven out of ten.

The solution has provided us with a great overall solution in many areas, such as security, deployment, and integrations.

I rate Microsoft Azure API Management a nine out of ten.

Since we built our product around APM, our clients use it directly. They find APM to be a simple and straightforward solution that fulfills all their API management needs.

Our clients use APM because it's a SaaS-based solution that comes with Azure Stack-managed services, making it easy for us to use and fulfill all their use cases.

We are actually partners. We built our product on top of APM and provide it to our customers.

API gateway-related features were fulfilled by APIM. So those features, we are completely leveraging for our solution, like throttling. It is fair and easy. It's a low-code, no-code model of API hosting.

There is room for improvement in the user interface and workflow for hosting APIs, especially third-party APIs. 

Another area of improvement is the pricing model. The solution has an add-on cost, and if we want to leverage some of the features, we are forced to buy it. So, cost-wise, it's not ideal.

I have been working with this solution for one and a half years. There isn't really a specific version since it's a managed service in the cloud. However, with Apigee, there are different versions available, as it can be hosted on-premises. But for APM, it's only available in Azure as a managed service.

I would rate stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. It can host it in different regions, and we can point to the same set of backups and try to expose the APIs. Our current customers are in the medium category that's why I rated scalability a nine. 

We have a strategic partner for technical support, and they are very responsive.

Positive

I would rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy. Previously, we were using Apigee, so comparing it to that, it's cloud-specific and opens the gateway. So there were some challenges.

The deployment was quick. The deployment of this product was managed by a manager, so once you set it up, it has a quick turnaround time. 

We used the Azure deployment model and followed the recommended steps for posting the APIs, and also followed the Azure recommended layer for deployment.

Compared to Apigee, which is a one-time cost for on-prem, this solution is cloud-specific and a managed service. So cost-wise, it's comparatively expensive. I would rate it eight out of ten, where one is low and ten is high. 

Moreover, there are additional costs to the standard licensing fees. We have to purchase four to five managed services around API to use it. For example, we use the express route and key vault, and we have to purchase those features along with API.

We explored different options and found that APM was the most suitable for our scenarios.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten. The reason is, as I mentioned earlier, it is best suited for our use case. One reason is that the product is only available in Azure. So, we are leveraging multiple managed services and building the product around that. Additionally, we select it according to the customer's needs. The hosting API workflow needs to be improved.

We use the solution to manage the APIs of the legacy app in on-premises systems at our organization. We use the solution for security purposes. It lets us put restrictions on who can consume the APIs. Also, we can keep a check on the dashboard for requests and the health of the APIs.

We are using Azure API Management as a platform. We have a ServiceNow instance. We connect it to the internet to have an internal connection network through on-premises systems. Here, we need to expose our APIs to security. So we take the help of Azure API Management for security purposes. Also, we can use dashboards to get information about API requests.

The solution's most valuable feature is the ability to create policies. You can customize the business and security rules directly with it instead of creating new systems for managing the same. With this policy, you can develop anything with them.

It is a good solution. The latest versions of Azure API Management have included many new features. At the moment, our APIs don't follow the RESTful concepts. So, we face a challenge at the initial stage of the project. We need to get cache policy requests. We have to develop rules internally for cache requests with the policy methods. So many other companies must be needing this feature. They should work on it in Azure API Management's following versions. 

We have been using the solution for four years now.

It is a stable solution, but updates don't work.

We have more than 400 developers and more than 1,000,000 consumers using this tool.

We have a technical consultant. Microsoft support is excellent. They offer a good support solution.

I didn't know about any other API Management solution before, but I had read about the Apigee from Google. Azure is better as it's easier to use and has more features than Google.

It takes work. One needs to learn about this tool, the policies, and how to work with them.

We have consulting companies that help us. The API Management is simple to deploy. We have instances for the production, developer, and staging environments. We have three instances, and the APIs also come with ARM templates. We have a central repository of Azure. Creating a new instance takes a long time, but implementing a new API is faster.

The solution comes with a standard license. Its price is one of its drawbacks. Some costs need to be more affordable for us. Frankly, Azure is our most expensive resource; it's costly.

The solution is very easy to maintain. With it, we can integrate all other products and easily manage them. We have all the interactions in the same cloud.

In API Management, we have segmented consumers' APIs and secrets' APIs. We have global secrets and patents. It is easy to use after you learn and research about the tool. So, one must learn about this tool before implementing it or have a consultant to help with the initial feedback and organizing API products.

I would like to rate the solution as an eight as the price is not low, and it becomes difficult to afford it. It's easy to use, but it could have been easier.