API management

So what’s the problem I’m having that makes me want to seek out an API management solution? You most likely have the following challenges:

• Scaling, your API or APIs is used by many clients in different regions of the world and you need to ensure that it’s available and responsive.
• Security, you need to ensure that your API is secure and that only authorized clients can access it.
• Error management, you need to ensure that your API can handle errors gracefully.
• Monitoring, you need to monitor your APIs to ensure that it’s performing as expected.
• Resilience, you need to ensure that your API is resilient and can handle failures gracefully.

For each of these challenges you could opt for a point solution, but that could be challenging to manage. Consider also that your APIs could be built in different tech stacks, which means the solutions to above challenges could mean you need different solutions for each API. If you’re having all these challenges, then you should consider a centralized API management solution like Azure API Management.

Let’s dive deeper into some challenges and see how a centralized API management solution like Azure API Management can help you address them.

Infrastructure as code, IaC

It’s perfectly fine by creating your Azure resources using the Azure portal, but as your infrastructure grows, it becomes harder to manage. One of the problems you face is that you can’t easily replicate your infrastructure in another environment.

It’s also hard to trace all the changes that are made to your infrastructure. This situation is where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) comes in. IaC is the practice of managing your infrastructure using code. To apply IaC on Azure, you have several options, one of which is Bicep. Bicep is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for deploying Azure resources declaratively. It’s a great way to manage your cloud resources. Here’s a simple example of what Bicep looks like:

BicepCopy

param location string = 'eastus'

resource storageAccount 'Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts@2021-06-01' = {
  name: 'mystorageaccount'
  location: location
  kind: 'StorageV2'
  sku: {
    name: 'Standard_LRS'
  }
}

In the preceding example, we defined a storage account using Bicep. We defined the location of the storage account, the kind of storage account, and the SKU (stock-keeping unit). Location is a parameter that we can pass in when we deploy the Bicep file. To deploy the file presented, we would use the Azure CLI like so:

BashCopy

az deployment group create --resource-group myResourceGroup --template-file main.bicep

The preceding command deploys the storage account to the resource group myResourceGroup and use the Bicep file main.bicep to create the resources in the file.