AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Implement Azure API Management

Azure API Management is a unified API gateway for connecting and securing your APIs. It provides a single endpoint that developers can use to access services in Azure or on-premises. By handling traffic and requests, it ensures scalability and reliability for your API solutions. You also gain a central point to monitor and control all API calls.

It supports policies to enforce authentication, rate limiting, and request transformations. These policies let you control who accesses your APIs and how often they can call them. You can also protect backend services by filtering or modifying requests. For clear definitions, APIs are documented using the OpenAPI specification, which makes it easier for developers to understand and use your APIs.

Virtual network injection and integration help you connect the API gateway to private networks. These integration options include:

• Internal mode: the gateway lives inside a delegated subnet, isolating traffic
• Outbound integration: the gateway stays public but can reach private or peered resources
  These choices support hybrid deployments and offer flexible network control.

With private endpoints and Azure Private Link, you can limit traffic to private IP addresses within your virtual network. This setup prevents exposure to the internet and adds another layer of security. You can create multiple endpoints for failover and use policies to manage traffic from each link. This ensures that only authorized clients on your network can reach the API gateway.

For extra protection, you can place an Azure Application Gateway with a Web Application Firewall (WAF) in front of API Management. This combination offers Layer 7 load balancing, TLS offload, and custom WAF rules. It defends against common web attacks while maintaining end-to-end network isolation. This approach helps you securely expose internal APIs to external clients without compromising safety.

Conclusion

Creating and documenting APIs in Azure relies on a robust API gateway. Azure API Management gives you a central, scalable platform to manage all your endpoints. With policies for access control and rate limiting, you enforce consistent security and performance rules. Using the OpenAPI specification, you provide clear, machine-readable API definitions.

Network features like virtual network injection, private endpoints, and hybrid integrations let you tailor access to your infrastructure. You can keep traffic inside your network or securely bridge it to on-premises systems. Adding an Application Gateway with WAF offers extra protection against web threats. Altogether, these tools help you build secure, reliable, and well-documented APIs.