What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure API Management?

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.

The lack of wording in the API could be improved. In the API you need to delete the suffix. It is annoying that you need to have a suffix. We can add a suffix at the API level, not at the operation level, and that could be improved on. There are a couple of features that are lagging.

The developer portal can be improved. There should be more resources available for the developers. Better integration with third-party products would helpful.

We haven't used API model that much, so I'm not in a good position to say recommendations as we are still exploring the Azure API management. We need more time to fully take in the solution before pointing our its flaws. The documentation could be improved for the customer. The instructions on the district API and the initial stages of working with the solution need to be documented better so that users are more informed and they can have an improved experience.

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.

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

They're trying to implement versioning and trying to be able to manage different versions of your API all at the same time, but they're not doing that just quite right yet.

Other products offer more customization options.

There is always room for improvement. There should be more analytics abilities so you can know how much traffic there is. Log Analyzer isn't well integrated with this solution.

In terms of improvement, it would be helpful if they could develop an on-premises option.

R&P, the publishing process could be improved. They are currently restructuring it, I believe. I'm not technical but we noticed that the old developer portal got deprecated and they're introducing a new one. It's not polished and still requires some development. It's the same with the publisher portal which I believe they've now integrated into the Azure portal. They're just starting to work with hybrids so it still requires input. It would be helpful if they were to include additional features and clearer configuration when it comes to API policies.

The portal where we publish the APIs could be improved. Maybe this is because we didn't configure it. It is quite easy to bypass API management because we have a lot of information shared on the portal, where we publish our APIs. I worry there is potential for a security breach in the API publishing. There needs to be more security available on terms of the way we publish them.

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.

This solution is only available as a cloud-based deployment and it would be very helpful to have an on-premises version. This is driven by the fact that some of our clients have specific requirements and they do not want to be on the cloud. I would like to have an administrator's option that shows me API usage and can generate bills that I can send to my customers. Currently, our customers can see the usage but not how much it is going to cost. For example, assume that you get 100 calls for free and then 100 more free each month, but after than, each call costs twenty cents or one cent, whatever the price is. The administrator can generate reports when the bills are available and can charge them to the customer. This could be done with a monetization module, which would be better than the manual calculations that we have to do now.

The API management has come a long way. Would like to see better scalability and performance. Performance is important for us.

Multi-tenant functionalities is missing from the system, especially when it comes to purpose specific requirements such as CI, branding, language, content structure. If you're aware of the details of API Management provided by Azure, there are two areas. One is for developers, and the other is for consumers. In order to support the best, or all the different use cases we have, the multi-tenant support would be appreciated.

The developer console for external users could be improved, especially in the testing site. I would like to see the security management for the APIs to be more granular.