Easily Understand Azure API Management

Introduction

In the past, if you created a Web API application, you could directly deploy it to the Azure portal. But nowadays you can’t do that. You must create an API management gateway on the Azure portal and only through API management can you deploy Web API applications. In this post, we will see all the steps to create API management on the Azure portal and deploy one sample Web API application into the Azure portal as well.

Azure API Management is a hybrid, multi-cloud management platform for APIs across all environments.

Azure API Management helps customers meet these challenges.

• Abstract backend architecture diversity and complexity from API consumers
• Securely expose services hosted on and outside of Azure as APIs
• Protect, accelerate, and see APIs
• Enable API discovery and consumption by internal and external users

API management components

Azure API Management is made up of an API gateway, a management plane, and a developer portal. These components are Azure-hosted and fully managed by default. API Management is available in various tiers differing in ability and features.

Image courtesy: https://docs.microsoft.com/

We can create an Azure API management now.

Create an API management on the Azure portal

We can go to the Azure portal and choose to create a resource and search for API management.

We can choose API management and click the Create button.

This will ask for the required information.

We can choose or create a new resource group and choose a region. Also, we can give a valid resource name, organization name, and administrator email address.

Now we can choose the pricing tier for API management.

The developer tier has a lower price. You can find all the price details from the link below.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-management/

We can choose the required protocol from the list.

Finally, we can review it and create the API management now.

It will take some time to complete the resource creation. (Usually, it takes up to 2 hours to finish the API management deployment.)

You will get an email from Microsoft after the API management is created.

Above is the overview of newly created API management. We can see the developer portal URL and gateway URL in the above overview.

We must create APIs from given templates in API management before deploying our Web API applications to the Azure portal. By default, we can see an Echo API automatically created inside the API management.