AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Configure the API Management Instance

Azure API Management (APIM) is a gateway that provides a single entry point for your APIs. It verifies credentials, enforces usage quotas, and logs metadata to help you monitor and control traffic. With APIM, you can apply policies at different levels to transform requests and responses as they pass through the gateway. By creating an APIM instance, you centralize how your APIs are defined, secured, and published to both internal and external users.

To create an APIM instance, you can use the Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell, or Infrastructure-as-Code templates like ARM, Bicep, or Terraform. During setup, you select a service tier—such as Consumption, Developer, Basic, Standard, Premium, or Isolated—and choose the region and number of capacity units. You can also integrate APIM with an Azure Virtual Network to tighten security and deploy across multiple regions for higher availability. Adjusting the number of units in the portal or via automation scripts lets you easily scale your instance up or down.

Securing the connection between the APIM gateway and your back-end services is critical. You can choose from several options to protect your APIs:

• Subscription key authentication for basic access control
• TLS mutual authentication with client certificates for strong trust
• IP filtering to allow requests only from approved sources
• OAuth 2.0 authorization for token-based security
• Azure Key Vault integration to securely store secrets and certificates
  These measures help ensure that only authorized clients can reach your back-end systems.

Defining API endpoints and attaching policies lets you shape how your APIs behave. In the policy editor, policies can run in the inbound, backend, or outbound sections to add or remove headers, set rate limits, or transform data. You can scope policies at the global, product, API, or operation level for fine-grained control. Plus, you assign APIs to products, manage subscriptions, and group users to enforce usage plans and quotas.

Integrating APIM with other tools and services streamlines your workflow and automates deployments. You can:

• Export API definitions to Postman for testing and collaboration
• Automate deployments with APIOps, Azure DevOps, or GitHub Actions
• Manage your instance programmatically via the REST API, Azure CLI, PowerShell, or SDKs
• Use Azure Policy to enforce configuration and security standards across multiple APIM instances
  These integrations help you build a secure, scalable, and automated API management solution.

Conclusion

Creating and configuring an Azure API Management instance gives you a centralized, secure entry point for your APIs. You learn how to set up the instance using different tools, choose the right service tier, and scale resources as needed. Security options like subscription keys, IP filtering, and OAuth 2.0 help protect your back-end services. Defining endpoints and policies ensures your APIs behave correctly, while integrations with tools like Postman and Azure DevOps automate testing and deployment. With these skills, you can build a robust and maintainable API management solution in Azure.