Developer Portal Overview - Azure API Management (APIM)

Introduction

In APIM, Azure provides a set of facility which make better management of APIs project. API Management has 2 portals and 2 types of users. The Azure Portal is used for API Managers (think users who publish APIs, operations, manage policy, etc.). The Developer Portal is used by developers who are using (think customers) your API. To use an API, the user/customer can register with the Developer Portal and get a Subscription to a given API and the associated key. So, you have to authenticate them.

Product

In Azure API Management, a product contains one or more APIs as well as a usage quota and the terms of use. Once a product is published, developers can subscribe to the product and begin to use the product's APIs.

Subscription

In Azure API Management, subscriptions are the most common way for API consumers to access APIs published through an API Management instance.

Developer Portal In APIM

Let’s do a quick hands-on

As a part of my previous article, we created APIM service with test APIs. We will be using same APIM service for this hands-on.

To start with developer portal, first we will need to publish developer portal.

Here, I have already published a developer portal app.

APIM provides provision to customize this portal through azure portal. We can open ‘Administrative interface’ through overview of APIM as below.

We have one product created ‘apim-product-demo’. In settings option, there are two checkboxes i.e., ‘Requires subscription’ & ‘Requires approval’, this means that to access this product, it requires subscription and approval for any new user.

To make this Product visible to developer, we need to publish this product and also need to add ‘Developer’ role in the ‘Access Control’.

Let’s sign-up for the user from developer portal, user will receive verification email post successful sign-up.

After successful verification of email, we can see user has been created in APIM.

Let’s login with created user.

User can see APIs but to access it, user will require subscription key.

To create subscription key, user needs to create new subscription for the Product. So, here we are creating ‘developer_subscription’ subscription.

We can see subscription is created but it’s not yet activated. Status is showing as ‘Submitted’.

Subscription can be approved only by ‘Admin’ of the APIM, this approval is required if the ‘Require approval’ property is selected on resp Product

Once subscription is ‘Activated’ by admin, then user will be able to access the APIs using subscription key which user can access from ‘Developer portal’ itself.

I hope this article will help you to understand end to end implementation of developer portal in APIM service.

Thanks for reading this article. Please share your comments and review for the same.

Happy Coding 😊.