Microsoft Azure API Management Reviews

We have several layers in our infrastructure. Some of our layers are more connector-based and interfacing with our systems of record and outsource service providers. Right now, we use Microsoft Azure API Management for that. We're now deciding what to use for the process layer, which is more orchestration and data-mapping-based.

If you were truly a .NET shop and truly Microsoft cloud-centric, this is the most cloud-native offering, and there are some benefits to that. It's really easy to use for simple passthrough APIs. It feels more modern and compatible with people with .NET skill sets, and that's a strong selling point.

The solution's data mapping and orchestration are very code-intensive or require callouts to external systems. They seem suboptimal for the more complex use cases.

A simple installation is very easy, and I rate it ten out of ten. However, it goes to the other extreme when you try to do complex use cases, like orchestration, aggregation, and data mapping. For such scenarios, I rate the installation a five out of ten because of the code intensity and maintenance you would incur.

The solution appears cheaper because it's a cloud SaaS model. Its benefit is that you can use a small amount, and it'll appear very cheap. However, once you scale up to your full volume, it'll be more expensive because it'll incorporate a bunch of different services that are holistically more expensive than the alternative.

There are around ten key security characteristics I look for in a solution. On the surface, my analysis so far seems to indicate that Microsoft Azure API Management has the ability to deliver on those parameters. Given the close relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, we hope the solution will evolve more quickly and incorporate AI more fully, but we don't know for sure.

Our goal is to create a composable financial institution. We are trying to get developers not to be the bottleneck anymore but to be more agile, to grow market share, and to grow national reach. To do all those things, you need very agile, world-class APIs. There are ways to make both work for that. We'll have to evaluate which one is the shorter path.

I would recommend the solution for cloud-native Microsoft .NET shops with simple API requirements. However, I would not recommend it for multi-cloud, larger shops with more diverse or complicated use cases.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

Microsoft Azure API Management is used for integration across multiple services, API marketplace solutions, and information exchange solutions.

The most valuable features of the solution are its importing and publishing.

The solution’s security and performance could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft Azure API Management for four to five years.

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

Our clients for the solution are small, medium and enterprise businesses.

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

Microsoft provides good premier support, but its general customer support is not that great.

Neutral

I rate Microsoft Azure API Management a seven out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The solution can be deployed in five to ten minutes.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten.

Microsoft Azure API Management is a cloud-based solution. Microsoft Azure API Management is a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use solution.

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

We have a couple of use cases for this  product. It's fully cloud-native and can handle telco distribution for end-to-end distribution management. Five or six years ago, we made a  fantastic product with microservices. I was responsible for rolling it out for a large telco in Qatar. They had no distribution or end-to-end visibility or platform. So we helped them to move to a cloud platform for their entire distribution and operation. The beauty of that product is when you look at the telco distribution standpoint your maybe five or ten thousand merchant ecosystem will be connected to that platform. It helps with generating several transactions in a minute or second. And it gives that kind of scalability in the back end. 

The other use case was for banking transactions. If you have your core banking platform that is legacy, if a user wants to bring in a lot of additional alternatives, they need to have some kind of a platform for enhancements. We made a cloud to bring some kind of their operations to the cloud. We made a transaction platform for them so that their merchants could access transactions.

The API management is very good. You have sophisticated dashboards that help you to understand what's really going on - in addition to whatever security layer that you can bring on top of that. It is easy to manage front and backend APIs.

You can put on your own security layer so that you know only the authorized people are accessing your back-end systems through the gateway. In addition to that, you have sophisticated dashboards and reporting for storage logs or logging. That is quite useful, specifically in the banking sector. 

You can limit items by parameters such as geography or private VPMs. 

You have different pricing tiers and pricing is based depending on the traffic. You can go to basic pricing if you like. Depending on your traffic, you have licensing options.

Microsoft manages everything so you can focus on building applications and deploying them.

The platform components are quite interesting. 

I'm not sure if there are certain areas needed for improvement. I haven't explored its shortcomings. So far, the requirements have been met.

Maybe the customization could be a bit better. 

My team found difficulty in migrating APIs from one platform to this platform. We could export and import properly. We made a complete API for a UAT environment, and when we moved the APIs, we ran into issues. 

They don't have a standard local IP. They only have a public IP.

I've used the solution for six to eight years or so. 

I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. It is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution scales well. I'd rate it ten out of ten. It's easy to expand as needed. 

We have both medium-sized and enterprise-level customers. 

Technical support has been fine. We are happy with their level of support. 

Positive

I have worked with other competing products, such as Apigee and AWS.

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. I'd rate the ease of deployment eight out of ten.

The provisioning takes a couple of minutes. Then you need to do some programming. 

The pricing is reasonable. I'd rate the cost in terms of affordability seven out of ten. 

The premium tier is too expensive for medium-sized organizations. However, the local IP only is offered at the premium tier. 

I did not compare this solution to others since I was promoting Microsoft at the time. 

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

People should explore API management. You do get full control of your API, and from a security standpoint, you have a good understanding of the touchpoints and far more control of your traffic. You know who is accessing your services. Even if a company has legacy systems, it should have an API gateway in front of its legacy systems.

We went with Microsoft since we were Microsoft partners.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use the solution to manage the APIs of the legacy app in on-premises systems at our organization. We use the solution for security purposes. It lets us put restrictions on who can consume the APIs. Also, we can keep a check on the dashboard for requests and the health of the APIs.

We are using Azure API Management as a platform. We have a ServiceNow instance. We connect it to the internet to have an internal connection network through on-premises systems. Here, we need to expose our APIs to security. So we take the help of Azure API Management for security purposes. Also, we can use dashboards to get information about API requests.

The solution's most valuable feature is the ability to create policies. You can customize the business and security rules directly with it instead of creating new systems for managing the same. With this policy, you can develop anything with them.

It is a good solution. The latest versions of Azure API Management have included many new features. At the moment, our APIs don't follow the RESTful concepts. So, we face a challenge at the initial stage of the project. We need to get cache policy requests. We have to develop rules internally for cache requests with the policy methods. So many other companies must be needing this feature. They should work on it in Azure API Management's following versions. 

We have been using the solution for four years now.

It is a stable solution, but updates don't work.

We have more than 400 developers and more than 1,000,000 consumers using this tool.

We have a technical consultant. Microsoft support is excellent. They offer a good support solution.

I didn't know about any other API Management solution before, but I had read about the Apigee from Google. Azure is better as it's easier to use and has more features than Google.

It takes work. One needs to learn about this tool, the policies, and how to work with them.

We have consulting companies that help us. The API Management is simple to deploy. We have instances for the production, developer, and staging environments. We have three instances, and the APIs also come with ARM templates. We have a central repository of Azure. Creating a new instance takes a long time, but implementing a new API is faster.

The solution comes with a standard license. Its price is one of its drawbacks. Some costs need to be more affordable for us. Frankly, Azure is our most expensive resource; it's costly.

The solution is very easy to maintain. With it, we can integrate all other products and easily manage them. We have all the interactions in the same cloud.

In API Management, we have segmented consumers' APIs and secrets' APIs. We have global secrets and patents. It is easy to use after you learn and research about the tool. So, one must learn about this tool before implementing it or have a consultant to help with the initial feedback and organizing API products.

I would like to rate the solution as an eight as the price is not low, and it becomes difficult to afford it. It's easy to use, but it could have been easier.

I use API Management for all of our AKS clusters.

API Management's price could be lower.

I've been using API Management for a year.

API Management is stable.

API Management is scalable based on the load.

API Management does not take long to deploy.

We used an in-house team.

I would rate API Management nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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.