Azure API Center: Centralizing API Management for Enhanced Discovery and Governance

 

Have you ever thought about having a single place to manage all your APIs? It could make it easier to find and control your services. Azure API Center is a solution that will help you do this. It offers a single platform for creating, publishing, managing, and monitoring APIs. In this article, we will learn more about this service, its features, benefits, and how it can help you.

 

New Free Training Course on Microsoft Learn: Introduction to Azure API Center!

 

Before we get started, we just had to share some great news! There's a new free training course on Microsoft Learn about the Azure API Center. It's a great way to get started with this service.

 

Once you've finished the course, you will get a certificate of completion you can share on social media and even on your resume or LinkedIn profile. Check it out!

 

 

What is Azure API Center?

 

 

 

The Azure API Center lets organizations develop and maintain a structured and organized inventory of their APIs, no matter what type, lifecycle stage or deployment location. This centralized hub helps stakeholders - like API Producers, API Consumers, and API Platform Engineers - discover, reuse, and govern APIs more efficiently. By providing version details, API definition files, and common metadata, Azure API Center ensures that APIs are easily accessible and manageable.

 

What are the main advantages of this service? Let's dive in and take a look at a few of them.

 

Azure API Center Benefits

 

 

• Create and Maintain an Organizational API Inventory: Azure API Center makes it easy to create a complete inventory of all the APIs in an organization. Plus, you can get API Producers, API Consumers, and API Platform Engineers working together to make APIs better, safer, and more productive for everyone involved, especially developers.

• Organization API Governance: Azure API Center lets you see all the APIs your company is using, and how they are being used. It's also worth mentioning that you can define custom metadata. This helps ensure the API definitions align with the company's standards.

• Easy API Discovery: This service also lets you promote the reuse of APIs to help developers work more efficiently and helps API Producers, API Consumers, and API Platform Engineers find APIs using embedded and customized metadata.

• Accelerate API Consumption: And last but not least, time is money. With Azure API Center, you can help API Producers, API Consumers, and API Platform Engineers get their work done faster and more securely by making sure they are using APIs in line with your company's standards.

 

 

What are its main capabilities? Let's find out more.

 

Azure API Center Main Capabilities

 

Azure API Center also offers a bunch of handy features that make managing APIs a lot easier, like:

 

• API Inventory Management: This lets you register all the organization's APIs in one place.

• Real API Representation: Add real information about each API, including OpenAPI versions and definitions. You can also list the different places your APIs are used and link them to the environments they are running in.

• API Governance: Organize and filter APIs using embedded and customized metadata. Configure linting and analysis to ensure API definition quality.

• API Discovery and Reuse: Use the Azure Portal, the API Center Portal, and Visual Studio Code integrated development tools like the Azure API Center Extension. This extension lets you create, discover, explore, and consume APIs directly from Visual Studio Code.

 

 

 

Region Availability and Prices

 

You can get the Azure API Center in several Azure regions, including:

 

• Australia East
• Central India
• East US
• UK South
• West Europe

And also, Azure API Center is offered in Free and Standard plans.

 

There are many other interesting aspects of Azure API Center that you can learn more about. We'll leave you with a video by Julia Kasper - Program API Platform Engineers at Microsoft made during Microsoft Build 2024 talking more about the service.

 

 

Next Steps

 

Azure API Center is a powerful tool for centralizing and managing APIs within an organization. With all its great features and future improvements, it's going to make it easier to manage APIs, give developers a better experience, and help you keep on top of things.

So, we encourage you to check out the Azure API Center. It can help your company manage APIs more easily.

 

Additional Resources

 

If you want to learn more about Azure API Center, check out the official Azure documentation and other resources below:

 

• Azure API Center Official Documentation
• Tutorial: Define custom metadata
• Tutorial: Register APIs in your API inventory
• Tutorial: Add environments and deployments for APIs
• Samples, labs, and templates for Azure API Center

 

 

Here are some blogs published by Microsoft Cloud Advocates and Product Managers about Azure API Center:

 

• Azure API Center: The First Look by Justin Yoo
• Azure API Center: Your Comprehensive API Inventory and Governance Solution by Julia Kasper
• Universal API Center - a truly comprehensive API catalog that warmly welcomes all your APIs! by Alexandre Vieira

Examples and References

 

The APIC (Azure API Center) Portal, as shown in the image below, uses the following technologies:

 

• .NET SDK 8.0
• Node.js v.18x
• API Center extension
• Azure Developer CLI
• Azure CLI

 

 

Link to the GitHub repository with examples of using Azure API Center with .NET and Javascript: API Center Reference

 

If you like to learn through videos, we recommend this video series on Azure API Center:

 

 

 

We hope you enjoyed this article and found it useful. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to share them with us.

 

And, until the next article.