Microsoft Azure API Management Reviews

There were legacy APIs running on-premises, and we wanted a modernized layer without disturbing the existing legacy layer. Microsoft Azure API management helps with that. We can wrap the modernized API layer. The modernized API layer can perform rate-limiting, monitoring, throttling, aggregating, and other boilerplate functions without disturbing the backend business logic.

I like that security features can be integrated with API Management. I also like that you can perform rate-limiting and throttling functions.

You can host multiple API gateways in different locations. If one goes down, then another will take over. Microsoft Azure API Management is good in terms of nonfunctional requirements.

The documentation is neat and organized, and as a result, we rarely have the need to contact technical support. 

Microsoft Azure API Management is lagging behind Apigee and should also have a better CICD process.

I used it for six months.

It's a stable solution.

Because it is on Microsoft Azure, we don't have to worry about scalability. I would give scalability a rating of ten out of ten.

Technical support is very poor and needs a lot of improvement. The process is not straightforward, and they are hard to reach.

Because it is a cloud solution, the initial setup is straightforward.

It is an expensive solution, but any API solution will be expensive.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Azure API Management at nine on a scale from one to ten.

The main use case is if you want to be exposed to an external endpoint. We use it for access. It can only be used by Azure API.

If I want to expose API endpoints to clients, we use this solution. 

The API management is great. It comes out of the box ready to go and comes with policies. 

It is stable.

Technical support is good.

We have witnessed an ROI.

We have to put the logs in Datadog. We need to use some other product to do all of the things we want. That costs extra. However, there are other solutions, like Dynatrace, that offer more features and have more functionalities. Right now, we have to use logic apps. You need more third-party apps to fill in the gaps. 

If I want to connect to other apps to Saleforce or Snowflake, et cetera, I need a quicker way to do mapping and to integrate everything together. 

I need to have microservice access. 

I'd like to have better flexibility and more capabilities. 

I've been using the solution for three to four years. 

I'd rate the stability seven or eight out of ten. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We do not scale the solution. We don't need multi-tenancy or anything like that. Our understanding is that if we did need to scale it would cost more. 

Technical support is very good and is available around the clock. 

Positive

I'm familiar with a variety of other solutions, including Mulesoft.

I have witnessed an ROI while using the solution. 

The pricing is expensive, however, it does offer great value. I'd rate the solution seven or eight out of ten in terms of value for money.

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

The product covers all of the basic needs you will need. If you need more robust options, Mulesoft might be a good option. However, this is a pretty good tool

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for API orchestration and UI management. We currently have 50,000 users. 

The UI management is very easy to use. 

The solution provides good management of API orchestrations. 

Technical support is very good and moves very fast. 

The API gateway can be very complex. We had difficulty managing end users for a very, very complex project. 

I am not sure that another API gateway would have better handled this difficult project. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have a partnership with Microsoft. Their support is very good and moves very fast. They are available to us in a maximum of ten to twenty minutes. 

The setup is very easy and doesn't take long. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

I also use WSO2 and Kong. Of all the options, Kong is my preference because it is easier to use. 

The solution's support is very good. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use Microsoft Azure API Management with our coding.

All we need to do is run our specific code because the dependencies are already there. 

I would like to see more security features become available. For example, the integration on premises could be better. Things could be more user-friendly. Currently, the integration we work with is more complex than it needs to be.

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for the past thirteen months.

I am finding Microsoft Azure API Management stable.

Day by day we are increasing the usage of Microsoft Azure API Management.

My current experience with technical support has been good.

We were using DIS. We needed to install the run times, libraries, and install operating systems. We had to make a lot of initial preparations to get the process ready to operate. Now it is already available and ready to operate with Microsoft Azure API Management.

I would rate the initial setup process a four out of five.  The setup was basic and good.

We do our implementation through one of our partners. The configuration was around fifteen to twenty minutes long.

There is no investment funding or upfront cost needed. 

There are no licensing fees we pay on a monthly basis.

We compared it with DIS because most of the time we were using DIS, for such kind of deployment.

Many people are using the API, and it is a prominent feature currently being used. I would rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten.

I am a software architect. The organization upgraded to API premium in order for us to be able to use virtual networks and security growth. We migrate things from Google Cloud. We use the solution to have an API that is calling internal resources to expose data on the internet. Furthermore, we also use API Management for partners and mobile apps.

Other than the cost, it is difficult to customize. The external policies are impossible to look at and configure.

The deployment time is too long. It is difficult to have multiple authentication mechanisms and authorization mechanisms at the same time.

Microsoft Azure API Management has not improved since I last used it in 2017.

By using Azure you are forced to use their technologies. For example, I wanted to use PostgreSQL, but I could only use SQL server. I also wanted to use Java or TypeScript, but the only option is .NET, which we do not use. They are very difficult to collaborate with as the solution does not integrate with other products. 

They do not offer extensions, if you want to use a Swagger extension you have to use XMLs, which are very complicated.

Another concern is that Microsoft Azure often does not have enough Linux machines in the region. If you want to deploy on Linux, and there are not enough, they will tell you to deploy in another region, or it has to be on the Windows server instead.

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

The solution is a bit more stable than it was in 2017. It is reliable.

Azure API is scalable. We have 20 people working with this product as a gateway to the outside world.

Technical support with Microsoft is poorer than AWS, but better than the one from Google Cloud. They reply too late. We had premium technical support at one point, however, they did not reply with anything we needed at the time. There is a concern with the knowledge base as well as the procedure in how they are instructed to reply.

I would rate technical support a three out of five.

Neutral

We switched to Microsoft Azure API Management because two years ago, someone in the organization decided to use this solution. I would never have made that decision.

I have had prior experience with API Gateway and Apigee.

The solution takes one hour to deploy. Like everything on Azure, it is difficult to create the deployment scripts because the ARM and Bicep that they use are awful. Deployment is very complex.

I would rate the experience of the setup of Azure API Management a two out of five.

The solution doesn't require maintenance as it is cloud-based. However, it does require monitoring.

The upgrade to Azure API costs 2000 euros per month, per instance, per unit. Our finance department asked us to find cost reductions. After conducting an analysis, I came to the conclusion that it was impossible unless we sacrificed security.

Azure API Management is the most expensive solution on the market. AWS is at least four times less expensive. Any price comparison needs to include the additional cost of the security you will need to purchase from Microsoft, which comes from their premium plan. The only way to reduce the cost is to sacrifice security when using Microsoft data.

I rate the pricing a one out of five.

The other option is API Apigee. It is the best in class and less expensive. Its deployment to API Gateway from AWS is easy and fast. 

In AWS API Management you can build everything from open API specification files. AWS has Swagger extensions that are built in that can define everything in Swagger.

I would switch solutions if I could. 

Any organization looking to implement Microsoft Azure API Management should look at other alternatives. Be cautious of the marketing behind Azure products. Once you decide on your solution, it is difficult to change.

I would rate this product a four out of 10 overall.

It's a very robust tool. There is a developer portal that can be used by developers, vendors and other external partners to create keys and manage their APIs. 

Enables you to configure the policies and modify the behavior of the APIs.

VNet integration facility is only available in the premium version so that is a drawback.

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for six to seven years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. The size of the clients depends mostly on the type of solution they are using. I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support team is easily approachable

Positive

The initial setup is easy. It takes a lot of time to deploy it. They are coming out with a feature that is supposed to shorten how long it takes.

Microsoft Azure is an expensive solution not for the large enterprises but for medium and small.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

In general, we use it for the front application, like the mobile banking application or some other service stuff. We found that it's easier to maintain these internet connections and so on, on the cloud.

In general, we started with Microsoft Azure Cloud as we needed a close integration with our internal or Office solution. In case of Microsoft, Azure Active Directory is easily integrated within the Microsoft platform, including Office. In particular, in API Management, used as front-end APIs, it's easy to manage. Now, we are looking ahead to the hosted solution, which is very nice. 

We use Microsoft due to the stability of the company. 

It's efficient enough and it's just enough for our needs to manage rules and so aforth for API management. We use it due to Microsoft's reputation. We need a stable provider. We cannot play with some providers. 

It is easy to set up. 

The solution is scalable. It is stable as a product as well. 

It's okay. It's not as good as Google. For instance, in Apigee, in Google.

One of the most important improvements for us would be if it supported the HTTP/3 version and new protocol over a quick connection. It's a relatively new standard since 2020. 

I've used the solution for about three years. 

It is a stable product. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. The performance is good. 

While it is scalable, there is some costs involved with expanding. 

We have about 100 people using the solution at the company in terms of deployment. In terms of clients using the solution, that's in the millions. 

We have a premium subscription. We have a local company, a local Microsoft office. We do not have a problem with the support from Microsoft.

We used a CA solution before, and CA was sold to Broadcom and everything changed, politics and so and so. We had to disable CA platform due to the provider. We believe the same issues will not happen to Microsoft.

The initial setup is very easy. It's not complex at all. 

There is a special group that is  responsible for the support and implementation of the platform.

I'm aware of Google, or Apigee, and it's quite a robust product. 

We are a customer and end-user.

It is a subscription service. It's definitely not on-premises in our organization. We do have our core system on-premises, of course.

I would recommend the solution. People have to first understand the different types of subscriptions, however. There are four of them, developer, and intermediates, and then premium, and it's costly. That said, it's not that expensive. It's a very technical piece of software. I can say it's stable and it satisfies our needs. It's just a bit complex. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

There's a customer who wanted to migrate their API from their on-prem environment to Azure. They're looking at utilizing Azure API to manage all their other APIs. We just started with migrating one of their APIs. They're still working with it, still trying to learn the difference between what they had for on-prem and Azure. We are in the process of actually migrating a lot of their APIs.

Access control is the most valuable aspect. It's the main reason really why a lot of clients are moving - as we are able to deploy multiple APIs and be able to also segregate who's got access to which API, who's got access to the other API. That centralized management is what the customer is really looking for.

The initial setup was okay.

The solution isn't missing anything. For the use case that we have right now, it's perfect. It offers everything that you'd look for in an API Management solution.

There's a new developer portal that's been added before they rolled out the new updates. I haven't really checked it out, however, the developer portal that they introduced is better than before. They've really improved on that one. If you are using the old portal, it's not as good. 

We have two different customers. The other customer wants us to move completely, to migrate their APIs to Azure. The other one wants to manage their APIs, which are running on-prem. I've explored that in the flexibility, in terms of integration with an on-prem environment. The integration could be improved for those on-prem use cases. 

The integration with other API gateways is where they might try to improve.

Support could be better. 

I started using the solution six months ago.

In terms of stability, I have seen that it is packaged into four different plans. If I'm not mistaken, there should be basic, standard, conception, and developer. I wanted to try to avoid deploying a lot of units, it uses a concept of compute units or scaling units. I was using the conception tier, which is not designed to be highly available. I was testing features, I didn't mind the level of availability. I suspect that if you choose the high-end SQL, it's most likely to be available. However, in terms of cost, I'm yet to find that out.

If you compare the SQL, and that's one that really supports scalability across regions, it's good. It's very scalable.

We have ten developers using the solution right now. 

We do plan to increase usage. 

Microsoft is huge, and when it comes to support, it's not so great as compared to, if you have something software specific. Whenever you ask them a question, they assume you to know everything. It's challenging to get the level of support that you'd want.

Neutral

We used to use Kong. 

Kong is more of an on-prem API gateway, and this one is cloud-based. And given that many customers are migrating to the cloud, it was actually one of the reasons why we're convincing the customers that we have used their APIs to migrate to the cloud. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

I have a basic understanding of the API fundamentals. Those were what I was looking for; that's what I was looking for first, just to see if my understanding of the fundamentals. With my level of knowledge, it was fine. 

For someone with basic knowledge, you can deploy the solution within a week. 

There is some maintenance needed. However, that person is supposed to be someone who's more DevOps inclined.

We handled the initial setup in-house. 

I've been using the conception tier. If you choose the lower-end tiers, it'll be fine, cost-wise. However, those tiers are just for development purposes; they're not really for the production environment. I would suspect if you move onto the higher tiers, it'll be pretty pricey.

I was looking into Azure API Management and the equivalent and in AWS.

I wanted to compare the functionality between Azure API Management and Amazon API Gateway, as there's a customer that wants AWS API Gateway instead of Azure. I just wanted to see if the features are similar. I'm looking into that now. 

We're a Microsoft partner. 

The role that I have right now is a role where I'm a deployment engineer for cloud services, so depending on what the customer wants, someone's migrating from their on-prem, from VMware, the Linux, the Hyper-V to Azure, someone has to design highly available solutions, like applications that are tiered, that is three-tiered or two-tiered. Some want to utilize API Management. With API Management, we don't have a lot of customers on that front, as they sort of don't understand how it works. Right now, it's an area where we've worked with two of our biggest customers that have got multiple APIs on their on-prem environment. I've got basic experience, especially on what an API is and the benefits of Azure API Management as compared to what they have.

We're using the latest version of the product.

We are completely moving our customers from their on-prem APIs. It's a complete cloud solution; they don't want any hybrid solution.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten based on the level of knowledge I have. The learning curve is pretty high. It's API Management and it also supports API gateways. It didn't decentralize those features, so the learning curve that's there for someone is a bit much.

I would recommend the solution to others.