WEB API Management - Part I

In this section, we’ll talk about WEB API Management. Now, from the high level, it’s look very much like Managing WEB API. Here, we need to talk about two things:

1. You build a Web API and decide to do business with that means you want to sell that API, already a bunch of people are doing the same. Like you want to sell services like messaging service, phone call service may be anything. So, you will monetize that.
2. The second scenario is you will be indirectly monetizing the APIs means you will be doing business indirectly. A fine example for the same is; you partner with some businesses and they get access to your service. Basically, it will help other companies for the integrated experience.

So, once you decided that you are going to experience one of these scenarios. Then, WEB API Management is best for you. Out of the box, it also helps to keep documentation side by side. Consider a scenario if you have given tons of API without documentation; this will be worst scenario to handle. So, from a developer perspective, if you are writing any API and you want to put the documentation then and there. Then, WEB API management is again a good choice.

One more scenario which I would like to emphasis here, let’s suppose you want to launch marketing Campaign and you don’t have analytics embedded with API; then you can’t even think of doing that. However, with Website, you can do the same exclusively by incorporating Google analytics and other stuff. But, if you are writing any API from scratch, then you need to think of key management, access, analytics in the backend and other important things. But, with turnkey service API Management, all these things will go away. So, I can have any WEB API hosted anywhere on any service provider; but Azure WEB API Management will sit in front of that. So, as you see below in the screen shot, developers develop/write APIs that calls their APIs via Azure proxy. And this is where all the magic happens, like analytics and other much needed behavior for WEB API done here.

Now, from Azure portal, you can create WEB API management as shown below in the screen shot:

Once, the API management portal has been created, you can go ahead and click on Manage link. This will open a new dashboard for API Management as shown below in the screen shot.

Now, here you can do all sorts of things like adding new API or importing an existing API and set bunch of rules here on the same and then monitor the same on a timely basis.

Then, you can add operations to it like shown below with documentation to that.

Once it got added successfully, then it will bring you back to the original screen as shown below with API added.

Next thing I need to do is to add the same in the products. Now, this is the place where you can change the behavior or apply policies. Here, you will add your APIs to the product. Below are the screen shots for the same.

Now, once I added the API to the products page, I need to publish the same as well.

Once done, then I will click on developer portal link; then this will open developer’s dashboard for the same. So, as I said, there are two things, publisher and developers. We have published our API first and now it's available for developer’s portal.

Now, when you click on APIs link, it will list your newly added API.

Now, below you can see a variety of options to call the API means from different backend. One point to note here; in order to make a request, you need to have a valid subscription id else this will result in 401 error message as shown below:

However, you can achieve the same from the Azure window itself.

Now, this is the actual API http://moviereview.rahulsahay.com/api/movies which is getting fetched via Azure WEB API proxy.

Once this is done. you can now check its analytics in the API Management window as shown in the below screen shot.

With this, I would like to wrap this session here. We’ll delve more in the coming session on the same. Till then, stay tuned and happy coding!CodeProject