Azure API Management - Your back-end api (Part 2)

Introduction

This is part 2 of a series of blog posts where I will be talking about exposing your back-end apis via Azure API Management as production ready apis.

In this post I will discuss a sample scenario that we will use throughout this series to explore the capabilities of the platform. 

Lets look at the following sample scenario.

Sample Scenario

I have an existing "Back-End-Service" that you wish to serve up via Azure API Management. This service essentially exposes user, post & comment data related to a blogging site. It's called "Yo Blog". 

I have made this "Back-End-Service" publicly accessible (http://52.175.244.3:8080) but in a realistic scenario this would be hidden in a private network with some form of security on top of it. If you would like to follow along, you can create your own serve as shown here https://github.com/rohit-lakhanpal/azure-api-mgt-resources.

As you can see, the following REST endpoints are exposed: 

User Related Operations: Operations about user

Operation	Description
GET /users	Fetch a list of all users
POST /users	Create user
GET /users/{userId}	Find user by ID

Post Related Operations: Operations about blog posts & comments

Operation	Description
GET /posts	Fetch a list of all posts
POST /posts	Create post
GET /posts/{postId}	Find post by ID
GET /posts/{postId}/comments	Find comments by post ID

An API Definition

Based on the "Back-End-Service" that you are planning to expose, you  now need to create an API definition. This is something that we will be using in the next stage to add 

I have created an API definition using Swagger. This is accessible at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rohit-lakhanpal/azure-api-mgt-resources/master/swagger.json (Note: If you have created your own API, you will need this link before the next step.)

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I will be writing a series of posts to cover this topic, stay tuned ..

- Part 1: Azure API Management - An introduction 
- Part 2: Azure API Management - Your back-end api
- Part 3: Azure API Management - Creating a gateway & exposing your api
- Part 4: Azure API Management - Add rate limiting & consuming the api
- Part 5: Azure API Management - Add security