Sven Malvik - Mastering Azure API Management: A Practical Approach to Designing and Implementing an API-Centric Enterprise Architecture

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Over the course of my technical career, and as a full-stack developer, I have dedicated many years to building web applications. I learned that when we developers manage multiple parts of a solution, the need for a well-architected, precisely implemented, tested, and documented API is crucial. It is the "glue" for the application components or even for the multiple heterogeneous applications. I recognized that the closer you get to the launch date, you have to have solutions for API security, performance, scalability, reliability, and monitoring. Multiply it by the number of APIs in the project, add support for the cloud and on-premise target environments, onboard new developer teams (sometimes external, with limited access) - and the need for a solid API management solution becomes crystal clear. I learned to understand and respect API layer complexity far beyond the requirement for having a well-architected communication protocol.

I met Sven Malvik, the author of this book, for the first time a few years ago at a developer community meetup I hosted at the Microsoft office in Norway. We got talking and I was shocked when he mentioned how many APIs he and his team support and add on monthly basis to Vipps (Norways largest mobile payment provider, and an ecosystem where Sven leads Cloud Platform). Knowing that Vipps runs on Azure, I immediately thought, this level of knowledge and expertise with Azure API Management service should be shared with the developer community! And now my hopes have been realized. Sven is a natural-born technical communicator, trainer, and community organizer who is extremely passionate about sharing his Azure cloud experience with the developers. He was a guest (presenting on Azure API Management) on my video show Cloud Stories from Norway, and with great pleasure, I nominated and guided Sven on his way to becoming a Microsoft MVP.

Fast-forward to today. After our countless joint events and collaborations focused on the technical audience, Sven kindly invited me to write the foreword to his book, Mastering Azure API Management. It is a culmination of his aspirations to share proven knowledge and expertise with the goal of teaching developers how to efficiently build great solutions.

From the very first chapter, you dive deep into the technical demos, examples, and expert how-to guidance. And its reassuring to know that everything you learn from this book is based on Svens experience with building the enormous scale ecosystem reliably serving millions of the users in Nordics every day. All of his findings, recommendations, and insights about Azure API Management are 100% real world!

Skills in Azure API Management service provide a strong foundation for cloud developers. It allows them to build projects faster and better, use fewer resources on management after the proper initial setup, and be ready for future innovations in cloud technologies. I recommend you read this book and keep it on your desk. You will revisit particular chapters during the building of your API management strategy for your current and future projects.

Enjoy reading and learning from Sven!

Maxim Salnikov

Azure Developer Engagement Lead at Microsoft

Technical Communities Organizer

Keynote Speaker

December 2021

Have you ever tried to program in two languages at the same time? When I started working with Azure API Management, I learned about the concept of policies, which happens to be XML files with C# code statements. Many API developers and administrators struggle with policies because of that but also because of its enormous power.

Many engineers that I helped to understand Azure API Management in conversations and during workshops experience this Azure service as a smarter reverse proxy compared to other services such as Azure Application Gateway and Azure Front Door. However, they find it somehow hard to grasp the details of it such as how products and subscriptions fit into APIs or when, where, and how to develop policies. Others look for ways to integrate Azure API Management into an existing architecture, be it hybrid or cloud native, and want to ensure secure end-to-end communication between API consumers and API backend web services.

This book will help you to understand why Azure API Management is more than a reverse proxy but a service for managing an API-centric enterprise architecture. You will learn about its core concepts and how you can work with them in a productive way such as publishing APIs, creating API versions, and developing policies. You will also dive into setting up a developer portal for your users, the API consumers, that they can use to learn about your APIs and subscribe to them so they can call an API while the API backend web service is protected in a secure way. If you are an administrator or architect, this book will teach you different networking modes so you can integrate Azure API Management into your hybrid or cloud native architecture. You will then learn how to log and monitor the traffic that is going through Azure API Management besides other typical administration tasks such as automatic backups and caching.

I have worked with Azure API Management since 2018. As I was the responsible engineer for Azure API Management in the company I work for, I made API deployments simpler for our developers than they often are described in blog posts. Microsoft liked the approach and invited me to Microsoft Build to talk about our journey. I have written this book to teach you Azure API Management in detail and everything thats important to integrate it into your architecture, so you wont need to read endless blog posts and spend hundreds of hours in testing everything out. Have fun!