API Management

API Management manages and hosts Web APIs, also called REST APIs. Web APIs provide access to an organization’s systems for customer, partner, and internal applications. For example, a health insurance company might publish a Web API that delivers provider information to its corporate customers. API Management can reduce developer effort by providing security and other basic infrastructure; for example, it can limit traffic to an API or enforce other policy, and it can authenticate and authorize requests. API Management could also provide a central management point for APIs developed by multiple teams in an organization. An API Management developer portal delivers documentation and other support for teams writing client applications that use a customer’s APIs.

API Management is offered both as a Microsoft-hosted service and as self-hosted gateway software. The self-hosted gateway software enables customers to deploy API Management in Kubernetes and Docker environments on-premises or in other cloud services (such as Amazon Web Services) close to where APIs are running. (Microsoft sometimes calls this option “Azure Arc enabling” of API Management, but the gateway software can be hosted on other vendors’ container platforms, not just Azure.)