Azure API Management is an Azure PaaS offering that provides a powerful governance layer for RESTful services. It provides many of the most common features of mature RESTful services and encapsulates them such that developers don't have to worry about explicitly building them into their backend services. Some of the key features of Azure API Management are listed as follows:
Service virtualization
Service throttling / rate limiting
Scalability
Importing and exporting API metadata via Swagger/WADL
VPN connectivity to your back end services where they aren't exposed over the internet
Security via OAUTH 2.0 based authentication and IP filtering
Request validation
Caching
Transformation (message bodies and headers)
Access Control (including a developer portal)
Monitoring
That's an intimidatingly large list of features so let's discuss where the value add is. Modern frameworks for building RESTful frameworks such as .NET Web API make implementation of bare bones APIs easy, and allow...