AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Implement Azure API Management

Azure API Management provides a central gateway for exposing your APIs to developers and partners. By using API Management, you can secure and monitor every request without changing your backend code. This service helps you create a consistent entry point for multiple APIs, whether they run in Azure, on-premises, or in other clouds.

When you publish an API in Azure API Management, you define operations, versions, and products. Products let you group APIs and control access through subscription keys or OAuth tokens. You can also set usage quotas and rate limits to protect your backend from excessive calls.

API Management policies let you apply pre- and post-processing rules. Common policies include:

• Cache: Improve performance by storing responses.
• Transform: Modify headers or payloads on the fly.
• Validate: Ensure requests meet expected schemas.

Finally, Azure API Management offers built-in analytics and alerts. You can track metrics like request volume, latency, and error rates. These insights help you identify bottlenecks and optimize your APIs over time.

Develop event-based solutions

Event-based solutions rely on asynchronous communication to build apps that respond to changes in real time. In this pattern, producers send events without knowing which consumers will process them. This decoupling makes systems more resilient and scalable.

Azure Event Grid is a fully managed event routing service. It lets you create topics and subscriptions so event handlers receive only relevant events. You can filter events by subject or data content, reducing unwanted traffic.

Event handlers often use Azure Functions or Logic Apps to process events. When an event arrives, the function triggers automatically, running code to update databases, send notifications, or call other services. This serverless approach means you only pay for actual execution time.

With event-based solutions, you can integrate services from both Azure and third parties. For example, you might subscribe to storage account events or GitHub webhooks. This flexibility lets you build powerful workflows that react instantly to changes across your systems.

Develop message-based solutions

Message-based solutions use queues and topics to enable reliable delivery of data between application components. In this model, senders post messages to a channel and receivers pick them up when ready. This approach supports load leveling and fault tolerance.

Azure Service Bus offers queues for point-to-point communication and topics for publish-subscribe patterns. Queues ensure messages are processed by a single consumer, while topics distribute messages to multiple subscribers based on filters. Both support features like dead-lettering, scheduled delivery, and automatic duplicate detection.

You can configure sessions in Service Bus to preserve message order when needed. Partitioning lets you scale throughput by spreading messages across multiple brokers. These capabilities help you design high-throughput and ordered processing pipelines.

Service Bus also integrates with other Azure services. For instance, you can trigger Azure Functions when new messages arrive or route messages through Logic Apps for complex orchestrations. By using message-based solutions, you create systems that gracefully handle failures and maintain data integrity.

Conclusion

This section covered how to connect to and consume Azure services through three main approaches. First, Azure API Management lets you secure, monitor, and transform APIs at a central gateway. Second, event-based solutions use services like Azure Event Grid and Functions to build reactive workflows that respond instantly to changes. Third, message-based solutions rely on Azure Service Bus to provide reliable, ordered, and scalable communication between components.

Together, these patterns help you build applications that are resilient, flexible, and easy to maintain. By choosing the right approach for each scenario—whether it’s API Management, events, or messages—you ensure your solutions can grow and adapt to changing demands.