Azure Basics

Azure APIM in Bullet Points

• Azure APIM is a platform to manage APIs.
• API Management allow organizations, publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers.
• Azure APIM allow us to decouple request validation from APIs.
• You can secure your APIs

API Management service has 3 main components -

• Management plane/Azure Portal [Manage admin tasks]
• API Gateway [Manage API calls]
• Developer portal [Interface for developers to interact with APIs]

There are two API Gateway Options available currently -

• Managed — indicates the gateway built into the API Management service and hosted by Microsoft in Azure
• Self-hosted — With the self-hosted gateway, customers have the flexibility to deploy a containerized version of the API Management gateway component to the same environments where they host their APIs. The self-hosted gateway is available as a Linux-based Docker container from the Microsoft Container Registry.

API Management can be run in three modes as of now

• Off —
  1/ This is the default.
  2/ API Management is not deployed into a virtual network.
• External —
  1/ The APIM gateway and dev portal are accessible from the public internet via an external load balancer.
  2/ It uses external load balancer. Service endpoints are registered on the public DNS server.
  3/ The gateway can access resources within the virtual network.
• Internal —
  1/ The APIM gateway and dev portal are accessible only from within the virtual network
  2/ It uses internal load balancer.
  3/ The gateway can access resources within the virtual network.
  4/ None of the service endpoints are registered on the public DNS server.

Important Use case

What if we have deployed APIM as internal to protect APIs, wanted to keep traffic inside Azure backbone etc and wanted to provide access someone from internet ?

In that case we can use Application Gateway to route connections !