Building and deploying a web API with Azure API Management

Posted on by Panther

Microsoft Azure is one of the most popular cloud platforms today, with a wide range of services catering to different needs, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Among its many offerings is Azure API Management, a service that allows developers to easily create, publish, and manage APIs. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of building and deploying a web API with Azure API Management using the following steps:

  1. Creating a web API project in Visual Studio
  2. Publishing the web API to Azure App Service
  3. Configuring Azure API Management
  4. Testing the API

Creating a Web API Project in Visual Studio

The first step in building a web API with Azure API Management is to create a web API project in Visual Studio. If you don’t have Visual Studio installed, you can download the community edition for free from Microsoft’s website.

  1. Open Visual Studio and select “File > New > Project”.
  2. In the “New Project” dialog box, select “ASP.NET Web Application” and give your project a name.
  3. Choose the “Web API” template and click “Create”.

Once Visual Studio has created the project, you will see a basic web API template with a default ValuesController.

public class ValuesController : ApiController
{
    // GET api/values
    public IEnumerable<string> Get()
    {
        return new string[] { "value1", "value2" };
    }

    // GET api/values/5
    public string Get(int id)
    {
        return "value";
    }

    // POST api/values
    public void Post([FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    // PUT api/values/5
    public void Put(int id, [FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    // DELETE api/values/5
    public void Delete(int id)
    {
    }
}

This default controller provides a basic implementation of HTTP GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods.

Publishing the Web API to Azure App Service

The next step is to publish the web API to Azure App Service. Azure App Service is a PaaS offering from Microsoft that allows you to easily deploy web applications, RESTful APIs, and mobile backends to the cloud.

  1. Right-click on the web API project in Visual Studio and select “Publish”.
  2. In the “Publish” dialog box, select “Microsoft Azure App Service” and click “Publish”.
  3. In the “Create App Service” dialog box, select your Azure subscription and create a new or select an existing resource group.
  4. Choose a unique name for your new App Service and select the desired operating system (Windows or Linux) and runtime (ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Node.js, etc.).
  5. Select “Create” to create the new App Service.

Visual Studio will now deploy the web API project to the newly created App Service in Azure.

Configuring Azure API Management

The next step is to configure Azure API Management to expose the web API as a managed API.

  1. Go to the Azure portal and select your API Management service.
  2. Under the “APIs” section, click “Add API”.
  3. Select “Web App” as the source type and choose your App Service from the dropdown menu.
  4. Specify the base URL of the API (e.g., “/api”) and click “Create”.
  5. In the “Operations” tab, you can add, edit, or remove the API’s operations (e.g., GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).
  6. Under the “Policies” tab, you can add policies to control access, security, caching, and other aspects of the API.

Azure API Management provides a wide range of features and policies that allow you to customize and secure your APIs, as well as monitor and analyze their usage and performance.

Testing the API

The final step is to test the API to make sure it is working as expected.

  1. In the Azure portal, go to the API Management service and select “Test”.
  2. Select the desired operation (e.g., GET values) and click “Send”.
  3. You should see the response from the API in the “Response” section, along with the status code and headers.

You can also test the API using a REST client such as Postman, or by writing a client application that consumes the API.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to build and deploy a web API with Azure API Management. By following these steps, you can quickly create and manage APIs that are secure, scalable, and highly available in the cloud. Azure API Management provides a powerful set of features that allow you to customize and monitor your APIs, as well as integrate with other Azure services and third-party APIs. Whether you are building a new API or modernizing an existing one, Azure API Management can help you streamline your development process and deliver high-quality APIs to your customers and partners.

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