Microsoft Azure API Management Reviews

The solution has pretty stable capabilities.

Their construction tool allows users to easily publish information about the API. It's basically just one click.

You can configure the subscription management onsite and link everything.

The developer portal that exposed the API documentation is great. You can just test the APIs in a very easy way. 

The web portal is useful. You can build a pretty comprehensive portal where users can sign in and you can basically leave the API there.

The API management provided offers good integration with different management systems, like OpenID, for example.

The user management is pretty seamless.

Pricing is definitely an aspect that can be improved. They should offer an additional free tier. For example, if there was a tier for new accounts created, it may help their services by getting people onboarded. Once you will give access to someone and they try it they'll see, "Okay, it works and you can pretty quickly add something on top of it". After that, the client will end up staying, and probably paying.

The cost is also complex in terms of calculating how much everything will ultimately be priced at. It's not straightforward as it takes into account multiple factors.

Technical support could be more flexible and try to meet the client's needs a bit more effectively.

The solution needs to provide more use cases so that we can refer them to clients. It will help answer any questions in relation to performance and load management.

I've been using the solution for about a year at this point.

There are some bugs that exist in this construction tool for the developer portal. We are submitting these bugs to Azure, so they already know about it. Overall, it's pretty stable.

In terms of Azure technical support, we've had no issues in regards to response times. They are prompt. However, in some particular cases, they unable to be flexible. For example, with MQTT blockers, while you might want another port, they might tell you to use the hosted solution in order to get them to configure it. We'd just like them to have more flexibility with requests like this.

In terms of corporate security nowadays, it's very important to be flexible. At the end of the day we get stuck in the bureaucracy. If they could practice flexibility, it would be better for their clients, who may not have the wiggle room on their end.  

That said, we're mostly satisfied with their level of service.

The solution has a kind of calculator and it's not always straightforward to figure out the logic in pricing. There are lots of services that are managed in different ways. For a non-technical person, it's a nightmare to figure everything out.

At the end of the day, you have to build approximate pricing for the solution. According to my experiences in multiple projects, you do get preliminary pricing that is close to or the same as the estimate.  

Right now, for a particular client, we're using a managed version of the solution, however, in the future, I foresee us hosting it somewhere in the cloud.

We're using the most up to date version of the solution.

Overall, the solution has a lot of great features. There are a few bugs here and there, however, a the end of the day, there's lots of value provided.

I'd rate the solution at an eight, on a scale from one to ten. It's got a rather high cost and still has some areas that need some improvement. Otherwise, I'd rate it higher.

It's more of a subscription driven consumption based model, where the APIs are developed to connect backend ERP systems such as SAP and deployed into a library for consumption by both internal and external consumers. The APIs are exposed to the consumers that get onto the API gateway and identify the needed API from the library, use the instructions to subscribe, quickly test and connect to the backend SAP to get the expected information/transaction processed.  Prior to this solution there was an age old EDI interface solution.  This is enabling the customers to be more flexible with their integration architecture and be more agile as it reduces the IT integration dependency and provides a better user experience.

This is part of Techwave application modernization strategy to bring solutions that can bring agility and flexibility to customers and be able to decouple business with huge IT dependent solutions.  This is helping us to help our customers migrate away from the age old EDI technology to the latest API and microservices based architectures.

It is enabling two things. First it is helping our customers get on the path of application modernization and be on the digital journey.  Secondly, it is enabling them to provide a better customer experience and adoption with their end consumers. 

The consumers have easy access to information than before (when it was EDI based processing).  Consumers had to reach to their IT for any new changes and integrate and/or had to download/email/phone to access/process the transaction with their customers.  Now it can be well integrated into their portal applications and/or integrated directly into their applications through API management, which makes them more digitally connected and better user experience.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the self-enablement through subscriptions for our consumers. Consumers can get into the API gateway library and register to an API from the catalog directly. 

Once the API is developed and added to the library with the registration documentation, it becomes pretty easy for consumers to access and understand the benefits and use of the API.  

The library acts as the central repository of all our APIs and use and access is pretty intuitive.

It's very easy to learn for a person not familiar with API.

Nothing in specific but there is always some improvements that can be made to user interface to enhance and improve the UX experience. 

As Microsoft adds more an more services to the stack will help and enable to ease the API platform integration with other ERPs and various platforms for us. There are more APIs coming out with lot more enhanced services that include IOT connected device integrations. Any help in understanding available API protocols and edge protocols easier will help us building our solutions faster.  We do see different services are being added day by day.

We are not using all of services at this point, but we are leveraging few at a time and building our solutions.  This is part of the evolutionary and exploratory based journey to transform the ecosystem of the customer to a digitally connected growth organization.

I have been using this solution on a particular engagement for close to a year now.  However, we at Techwave have been using API manager in other areas as well for some time.

As it is a SaaS model, we always end up having the latest version in use.

The stability is great, as mentioned earlier it is backed by Microsoft Azure platform and that brings good stability as it is and being the cloud solution we do not have to worry about scaling either.

Monitoring of the usage and understanding the throughput is much easier with these API platforms than with the older EDI transaction based backend operational monitoring. The visualization reports on consumption is very easy and the analytics driven from these visualization can be used in your ROI discussions and management decision process, if needed.

This is a scalable solution and my impression is positive. Consumption is increasing. The scalability doesn't seem to be a challenge because it's a cloud-based solution. Scaling the bandwidth or the capacity is not going to be a challenge.

Our customers are using this solution and I can't disclose the number of users, but we have good usage.

We provide technical support and haven't gotten to a point where we couldn't solve an issue.

We have not contacted the Microsoft technical support yet. I am sure that they would be good but we can't comment in that area as we have not been in that situation.

In this particular customer, they were using EDI-based transaction processing. We have been able to transform them into the API journey.

EDI technology is of the past and API is the modern technology that has been leading in the digital transformation, enabling them to have consumption across various platforms. Whether it's a cloud, on-premises, or an applied solution.

Because we are trying to move away from the EDI, the initial setup wasn't that complex. The interfaces were already there in the EDI. This engagement is more to transform existing EDI-based approach to an API-based one. The business logic, more or less, is there. This initiative is more to help us decouple technical stack from the business process.

The API manager is managing the business interactions, whether it is the consumer onboarding or the customer decoupling them from the IT based EDI processing. 

The EDI would require that the customer technology team and the company technology team communicate and work together to integrate the interface. Whereas here you don't need to worry about it. It's simple as a business consumer signing up for an API, and all they need is a link to click and get the URL into their space and then they are done.

It's an easier way to integrate their API. If you want to make it into a more robust application, that's a different process, but consumption-wise it's easier. 

For those who do not want to integrate it into their applications, we have been giving them an application that they could just install from an App Store on their portal. This application will then expose the APIs available for use.  All they need to do is subscribe and get going.

Implementation was pretty simple in this particular engagement. We had a vision of how the API is going to be consumed and how many were needed. We paced ourselves in an agile model with a simplified storyboard and a proper velocity mapping of the activity.

It took anywhere from three to four weeks for each API to get them ready and we took it at our pace. We had released approximately ten API's in less than six months.

We had a six-member team for deployment, including the BA and project management. In the post-deployment, we only need three people to maintain.

We implemented this solution for our customer as an implementation partner.

We have not yet measured the ROI on this engagement yet.

It's being paid monthly.  It is comparable and falls in the mid range in the competitive landscape.

We have evaluated WSO2, APIGEE, MuleSoft with API Manager

API and microservices based architectures is the modern architecture to enable organizations for digital growth.  With that said Microsoft Azure is definitely is in the top quadrant in this space and are investing to grow this service portfolio by leaps and bounds every day.

Based on our customer ecosystem and the predominant technology stack in use, the decision with Microsoft platform aligns well with their transformation roadmap. There is going to be some level of Microsoft cloud solutions in play. 

Each customer has to conduct an assessment on the need for a platform based on the technical debt they are carrying along with people and process.  They need to take a look at the existing ecosystem, software technology stack, current ERP, and the applications that need to be integrated into API based platforms. 

I would suggest Azure API Manager should be in your selection process.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The tool helps to manage APIs. 

The tool does what it's supposed to do. 

The product needs to introduce a developer portal. 

I am working with the tool for ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

My company has around 20-30 customers for the solution. Each customer can have about 100 users for the tool. 

Microsoft support is good. We have regular sessions with Microsoft where we can have private previews of new features. 

The tool's setup depends. If you use it in the CI/CD pipeline, then the setup is complex. To deploy the solution, you need to create a template and enable the features. 

There are different tiers for pricing. You can even use the free version. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

I mainly use Azure APIM for access management.

Azure APIM's best features are its straightforward access management (it's a single point of access for all monitoring and logging and for policy implementation) and its integration with the Azure Cloud infrastructure.

In the next release, Azure APIM should include deployment in various environments and CI/CD for deployment. They could also improve their access management portal.

I've been using Azure APIM since 2017.

Azure APIM is pretty stable.

Azure APIM is scalable.

If your services are built on the cloud, I think APIM is the best tool. I would rate APIM eight out of ten.

My primary use case is as part of a multi-channel strategy wherein APIMs are being used with micro-products or third-party clients. Our web application firewall receives all the external and public traffic, and it re-routes to the APIM, which is on the private subnet. The APIM manages both in authentication and authorization service composition layer.

One thing that could be improved is to remove the dependency of Kubernetes as an external L4 load layer balance. It would also be useful if APIM could integrate internally with Kubernetes right out of the box.

I have been using this solution for around two years.

General support has been very good, but sometimes when immediate support is required, it isn't available.

The initial setup was quite easy as it is a managed service.

I used a managed service to implement.

I would rate this product as seven out of ten.

I am using Microsoft Azure API Management to connect external systems.

The solution has overall high performance.

Microsoft Azure API Management could improve by having better integration with third-party solutions.

In an upcoming release, there should be more focus on API lifecycle management, such as MuleSoft provides and the API gateway is not comprehensive enough, we need to put a lot of extra effort doing manual work. 

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for half a year.

The solution is stable.

For what we have been using the solution for it has been scalable.

Our company is a medium-size using this solution.

We have found some configuration that is not supported by the solution yet. There is room for improvement in their support.

I would rate the technical support of Microsoft Azure API Management a four out of five.

The setup and configuration are very quick.

The price of the solution is reasonable compared to others. 

We are still looking for a better API-optimized solution.

I would recommend this solution for some small and medium-sized projects, as it is quite easy and effective to start with. I am not sure if it is suited for large companies that have heavily loaded APIs which the solution might not be able to support.

I rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten.

We use Microsoft Azure API Management with a custom software solution.

I like the stability and the ease of use.

The licensing fees should be cheaper.

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

Microsoft Azure API Management is a stable product.

It is a scalable solution. We have 60 users in our organization who use this solution.

Technical support is good.

I knew MuleSoft Anypoint. I worked with it for two years.

It was better for the enterprise architecture to use Microsoft Azure API Management.

Microsoft Azure API Management is easy to install.

We have a team of four engineers and managers to maintain this solution.

The licensing fees are expensive. I would like it to be cheaper.

Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Microsoft Azure API Management an eight out of ten.

We have two approaches to how we use the solution. We own the managed services and the other we have customers take the subscription and we manage it. 

From my understanding, there are some constraints around governance and service-to-service intercommunication managing priorities and our own governance. Examples include, how you manage all your clusters, the entire service communication, and having more tolerant experts.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

The technical support has not been the greatest. Microsoft has been outsourcing its support services and we have quite a few challenges in terms of technical support. We rarely asked them for anything and try to find the solution ourselves. This has been our most recent experience. However, there are certain advantages as well. Now you have a large internet resource pool to support Azure. This balances the support out, but otherwise, if you are looking for very specific support, there will be some challenges for your teams.

The initial setup is not that complex, but there are certain challenges.

We are limited to what choice of solution we can purchase. There are multiple aspects here. If it is a choice that we have to make, then we do it based on the requirement or recommendations, such as GCP, AWS, or Azure platform. However, given the present circumstances, the customer base that I am supporting at the moment is all Microsoft shop customers. Their inclination is always towards Microsoft-based solutions. That is where it has left us with no choice, but to go with Azure. While we still recommend this solution in some cases, for instance, analytics and where we need the big data solutions. We have been pushing for a GCP and in some cases to have AWS as well. For now Azure is the platform and this has been the journey that has left us with no choice but to go with it. Based on the resources that we are leveraging, the price we are paying to use this solution is slightly higher than other competitors. In a few cases, it has its own advantage in some resources. 

I have evaluated GCP and AWS.

I would advise those wanting to implement this solution that they can use this solution if it fits their deployment criteria. However, there are better options available.

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

This solution is very flexible, and it's very compatible with the other Azure products.

The developer portal can be improved. There should be more resources available for the developers.

Better integration with third-party products would helpful.

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

This is a stable product and we intend to continue using it in the future.

We have more than ten users and there are five developers.

The support for Azure is excellent and we are satisfied with it.

The initial setup is very simple. It doesn't take longer than one or two hours to deploy.

A consultant assisted us with the deployment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The Azure Active Directory Synchronization is quite good.

They should improve the inbuilt policies that they have and that should properly create a deployment architecture as well.

We have been using Azure for about a year. 

It is stable.

It is scalable. 

The price could be lower.

At the end of the day, all the products are one and the same, just that some of them have more features than others. That's all.

I would rate Azure a seven out of ten. Not a ten because I would like for them to improve on the number of policies it has inbuilt and for it to have better deployment architecture.