How To Create Azure API Management

Objective

In my last article ‘Overview Of IPaaS’, I gave an overview of azure integration service. Now I am starting a series of articles where we will learn basics to deep dive into each integration service. Fiirst I am picking the API Management, and I am sure after writing few articles on the API Management, you will be able to use API Management service for your service integration project.

So, in this article, we will create API Management service and will know the basic settings which will be very useful with hand on experience in later article.

Prerequisite

You must have an Azure subscription, if not, you can get a credit of $200 for one month free by clicking here.

Let’s begin now.

Step 1

Login to the azure portal http://portal.azure.com/ with credentials then go to All Services-> Integration-> API Management Services.

Step 2

After clicking on API management, you will see the below screen and then click on either create on top left or create API Management Service in the middle of the screen.

Step 3

After clicking on the Create API Management Service, you will see below screen to provide some user input to create API Management Service.

Step 4

You can provide the inputs accordingly, as I have provided the following:

• Subscription
  It will be auto-populated anf if you have multiple subscriptions then you can select whichever you want, as I have free one so I will leave it as is.
• Resource Group
  If you have already created it earlier then you can use that one, otherwise click on Create Now and create it because to create any azure service, we require resource group, it’s like a container.
• Region
  Select the region the closest one to you. I have selected East US because sometimes a free subscription doesn’t have service available to a nearby location.
• Resource Name
  You can give your API Management name as I have given the az-learningapim.
• Organization Name
  API Management asks for Organization Name for use in the developer portal(will describe later) and email notification, so you can provide accordingly.
• Administrator Email
  It is required to receive all the system notifications sent from API Management, so provide your email id.
• Pricing Tier
  Pricing tier is a very important field to be selected and it is based on your requirement. So in the future will discuss pricing as well, as of now, I kept default one Developer(NO SLA). In this tier, SLA(Service Level Agreement) is not promised by MS Azure.

After completing this screen there is an option to go next and fill the network setting, but we are not going to now, we will do it later if required. Now you can click on Review and Create button, It will show you what you filled and what you have not filled. Then you can click on create button to create API Management.

It will take around 20 minutes to deploy the resources. You can see the below screen while deploying the API Management. After deploying it you will get a button called ‘Go to resource’ on the same screen.

Step 5

Now we have brand new API Management service created where we can see lots of stuff but will go through what is important as part of development. Will go through the APIs, Product, NamedValue, Developer Portal, etc.

Before going to create product and API development, first we can understand what is product and APIs.

Product

In API Management, a product can have one or more APIs, group visibility settings and set usage quota and the terms of use, it’s like a container. Developer can subscribe to the product to use the product’s APIs.

APIs

APIs are the core things in API management. A product has one or more APIs and an API has one or more operations. The operation has the policies where we can do our logic, we have inbound policies, outbound policies and on error. We can call the backend service by sending the request required to backend and get the response back from the backend service. While sending request to backend, we can leverage it with lots of useful API management policies.

Gateway Endpoint

APIs give us a gateway endpoint which we can call by passing a valid subscription key ‘Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key’ in the header or a ‘subscription-key query’ params with a valid subscription key.

In the next article, will create the product, API and will start playing around with the API policies.

Hope this article will help you to understand API Management from scratch.

Thanks:-)