Something I'm also realizing,
as I talked to more and more organizations in
my capacities of PM and developer division.
Is that APIs are really
the driving force behind powering this
digital transformation we're seeing across
all industries right now APIs provide
that avenue for transformation.
Internally,
you probably already have APIs
for things like HR profile,
inventory,
shipping.
And if you don't,
you're probably planning on creating them
for new business scenarios.
And then externally,
there are APIs
now they do all kinds of awesome things,
like sending SMS messagesor managing marketing
campaigns.
And so most applications that we talk
about an IT department building are
just a user experience that's built on
top of these APIs built for interacting with
these APIs.
So it's super critical that we make
it easy to consume a piece in the Power
Platform.
And so we do that for you with hundreds of
pre-built connectors like Haley talked
about earlier,
that you can use to consume these APIs
but what about internal APIs that
would already exist in that catalog.
So Power Apps has a concept called connectors,
which are just a way to leverage a
particular API in my application to expose
APIs to citizen developers
We just need to build a custom connector to
make that possible so that there's the
connectors,
which are the default,
experiences we get in the Power Platform
for connecting to external data
and then we also have custom connectors,
which are just connectors,
that are doing the exact same thing
as the regular connectors,
but connecting to internal APIs
So this may sound very complicated,
but really - I literally promise
all it is is clicking around in the
Azure Portal.
So all we need to do is put our
APIs into something called API management.
And once we do that,
we can easily expose all those APIs
automatically to our developers in
the Power Platform.
So why would I put my APIs into this
API Management thing?
What is this,
API Management thing?
Well, if you do it,
you get a ton of awesome features.
Well, the obvious thing is,
it's gonna provide a service for me
to manage my API
Its called the API Management service -aptly
named -
I can improve my API
discoverability.
So if I have all my APIs that I
have internally there in all of these
random Azure services distributed across
your entire organization by putting them
into API management,
I'm creating a catalog of APIs
that people can see.
I can apply management for APIs
that are both in the cloud like I've
been referencing.
But even on premise,
we can expose on premise APIs through
API management as well.
I can do things like apply authentication and
authorization.
I could do things like apply inbound policy
to filter by IP address for added security.
But for performance,
I could do things like cash responses to
reduce my API latency,
So there's a lot of benefits to just
putting your APIs and API management before
we even get to the Power Platform.
But if we put our APIs into API
Management,
there's a literal one click option to
expose that API to the Power Platform for
consumption by citizen developers.
So how do we do that?
Well, as a pro developer we mentioned,
all we need to do is put our APIs
into API management.
And then it's just clicking.
So in the video that's playing now
you can see that I'm in API Management.
And when I click export on my API,
here, I have several options of different
services that I can export my API
to. If I click on Power Apps and Power
Automate,
I'll have the option to select my
Power Platform environment.
And then I just pick a name that will
(used to be called) used to call that
API in the Power Platform.
That's it.
Literally that export button click and
selecting the environment and picking a
name for the API that will be used
when people call it in the Power Platform.
That's the only unique step that I
need to take
as a pro developer to expose this
API so that people can build applications on
top of it inside of the Power Platform.
All of the other stuff that happened before
now putting it into Azure,
exposing it to API Management.
Those air things I'm probably already doing
is a pro developer,
so they're not unique to this scenario.
The only thing I need to do,
which is pretty powerful to enable all
those APIs that we talked about this rapid
application development we talked about
earlier, is literally click a button.
It's that simple.
So I encourage you to give it a try
because it's super easy.
Of course,
I can use this functionality in the
new Power Apps experience in Microsoft Teams
that Haley showed earlier as well.
So my favorite thing is that if the
application I'm building is distributed within
the boundaries of Microsoft Teams itself,
I could build low-code applications that
leverage my APIs and API Management and
distribute those apps to
others at no additional cost.
So all of the cost there is covered within
my license I already have for Microsoft Teams,
so there's no cost to build a Power App
that consumes pro-dev APIs,
backed by API Management,
When that app is distributed in Microsoft
Teams, that's really powerful.
So the Power Platform is the perfect vehicle
for consuming these internal and external
APIs and using them to build applications that
really do transform the way we do business.