Microsoft recently announced the public preview of Azure API Center - a part of the Azure API Management platform that serves as a central hub where users can keep track of all their APIs company-wide, making them readily discoverable, reusable, and manageable.
The company states that Azure API Center is an ungated public preview for everyone to try as a follow-up of a private preview earlier this year. The service is now available in the Azure Portal, and users can:
- Create an instance of the API Center service
- Define and manage custom metadata schema for their APIs
- Register (add) new APIs
- View, create, edit, or delete API versions and associate API versions with environments
- Browse, filter, and search APIs based on their metadata
Massimo Crippa, a lead architect at Codit, wrote in a blog post on Azure API Center:
In the current version of API Center (preview), we can mainly interact with three objects: APIs (along with their versions), Deployments (at which development stage your APIs are), and Environments (where the APIs are hosted).
In addition, the documentation of Azure API Center describes the relationships of the three objects:
- Each API can have multiple versions and multiple real-world deployments
- Each API version can have multiple API definitions
- Each API deployment is associated with a specific environment and a specific API definition file
Main entities in API Center and how they relate to each other (Source: Microsoft Learn Azure API Center – Data Model)
In response to the preview of Azure API Center, Christophe Gigax, a Cloud architect, asked on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a tweet:
Still don't understand how is it different from the actual APIM API management section from the portal?
With Daneel3001 responding:
APIM Portal is for platform team, API Center is for (internal) API producers/consumers. API Portal is when you have time to build one that can be either for internal and/or external API consumers.
According to FAQs, API Center is a stand-alone Azure service complementary to Azure API Management and API management services from other providers. In addition, there is a REST API for performing operations on selected entities.
Azure API Center is available in Australia East, Central India, East US, UK South, and West Europe Azure regions. Furthermore, details of the service are available on the documentation landing page.