Likelihood to Recommend For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.
Read full review If you are truly using IBM API Management for an API gateway, you will be ok. if you start trying to build custom scripts to transform messages complex in nature, it will soon become unmanageable.
Read full review Pros Easy integration with Load Balancer and Azure Scale Set to provide a full solution for traffic management. With rich routing rule, we could use one Application Gateway as the central point for all internal applications to expose to the external network. Read full review Import APIs - We have an existing inventory of APIs and services, so having an easy import process was required. IBM provides the ability to import Swagger so the process was quick and easy. Service Offerings - Can create plans to control various model offerings for varying clients depending on the need. You are not locked into a tier structure and can customize if a need arises. API Usage - visibility into the use of an API with a wealth of reporting information allows you to support an API from a production use to trending and forecasting any future growth. Read full review Cons Live examples in the Azure documentation Application Gateway UI Blade in Azure Portal can be streamlined Have more advanced feature set as WAF (Web Application Firewall) Hajira Khan Senior Project Manager | Technical Project Manager
Read full review Troubleshooting deployment pipeline - identifying issues with your api based on restrictions through a deployment pipeline is difficult. If a quality assurance environment is less stringent than a production environment, making sure your api is accessible and configured appropriately is tough. Code level scripting is limited to javascript and xslt. so if any complex fanning needs to occur, you are limited in tooling. Administration is more cumbersome than it needs to be. There are roles/profiles that are defined, but to use a group email for the approval or use of an api needs to managed better. A more thorough thought process needs to be defined - which I think IBM is tackling as an improvement. Read full review Support Rating I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Other load balancing tools in Azure (Azure LB and
Azure Traffic Manager ) are limited in their functionality in comparison with the Azure Application Gateway, and also, they don't provide security features.
Azure Firewall , although it has security features, is more expensive, and most importantly, it's not a load balancer at all.
Read full review There are a lot of similarities between
Apigee Edge and IBM API Management. Some of the differences at the time of this posting is... 1) IBM APIM/C integrates better with other products. Dynatrace is used to track API and service specifics with the ability to offload those statistics for operational reporting. 2) If you are evolving from DataPower, IBM API Management is a logical choice to support additional REST APIs. 3) Generating keys is simple. Integration of those keys with a secure data vault is easy as well for your consumer.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive : Improved performance and scalability Positive : Better and enhanced Security Positive : Efficiency Negative: Cost Negative: More resources to manage. Read full review Centralizing on an API management platform was imperative. Being able to support SOAP UIs as well as REST APIs was required. Because of the tooling, service inventory and provisioning can be managed - regardless of the pricing and cost structures are used. Constructing plans that provide tiering options based on rate limits help in onboarding new consumers. The lesser cost in onboarding through an API gateway outweighs the cost of modifying/configuring an API to handle multiple clients. Defining guidance and onboarding practices while rolling out the product also helps in the adoption, reference architecture, and governance that can save your company money. Read full review ScreenShots