>> Learn how to get started with
Azure API Management in this episode of Azure Tips and Tricks.
Azure API Management is an Azure service that can protect
your APIs and offers a lot of functionality to manage them.
Let's explore how it works.
First, we'll create a new Azure API Management instance.
Search for API Management and that's it.
Now created. Now, I need to type in a name.
Next, I pick an existing resource group.
I will also give in
an organization name and I'll check the pricing tier.
There are several tiers including the consumption tier.
This is a serverless option that only costs money when you use it.
I'll leave this as is and "Create".
This can take a while,
so I'll skip ahead to when it's done.
Here is the Azure API Management instance.
Let me show you what it looks like to add
an API to be managed by API Management.
I'll do that here in the "APIs menu".
I'll pick "OpenAPI" and then I need to fill in this dialogue box.
I'll use the demo API at this URL.
This is a demo API that is hosted by Microsoft.
I also need to select a product to associate with this API.
I'll explain what that is later on.
Here we go. Now, the API is managed by API Management.
So, to call it,
you'd use a URL exposed by API Management.
We can now use API Management to secure
the API and to do all sorts of other things,
like transforming requests and response payloads from XML to JSON.
Let's test the API.
Here you can see all of the operations that API exposes.
I'll test the get sessions call.
There it goes and,
it works. HTTP 200.
People that want to use this API can
sign up for that in the Developer Portal.
That's this portal. You get this out of the box.
Let's go to our API. Here we go.
As a developer that wants to use this API,
I can explore it here and try it out.
To call it, I need to pass in a subscription key.
This is a key that you get when you sign up for
the API and subscribe to a product.
API Management uses this key to track
who is using the API and if that is allowed.
I already have a key because I'm
automatically signed in as the administrator.
Let's go back and take a look at products.
Here we see the starter and unlimited products.
You can think of these as subscription types
that consumers of the API can sign up for.
We have associated the starter product to our test API.
You can use the product to set
access policies and control who can use what,
and you can set the policies.
The starter product for instance,
has a rate limit policy for inbound requests that says that,
callers are only allowed to fire five requests per 60 seconds.
That is just one example.
You can set all sorts of policies including ones that
restrict the amount of data that requests can serve.
So, let's try that out in the Developer Portal.
Here, I'll try the API to see if we can hit that limit.
Let's send the first request. That went well.
HTTP 200, which means that it worked.
Again, that worked too.
Again, that's good.
Again, that's four requests and the fifth,
that failed. Too many requests.
Which is correct because we tried it
in the API Management Portal as well.
So, we already used five requests.
As you have seen, Azure API Management is
a very powerful tool to manage your APIs.
Go try it out.