Apigee is by Google and seems to be promising. The cost seems high though. With Azure, we do not have to make any special purchases. CapEx vs OpEx! But, Apigee could be more environment independent compared to Azure APIM. The promise of speed by Apigee is also better compared …
It’s a great tool, and so easy to seamlessly connect into your current Azure world that it’s hard not to look at it or even test the waters with it. It’s priced well, and is feature-rich enough to accomplish most tasks. I think the ease of having everything together and the …
The range of policies that enable the APIs to loosely couple it with security, rate limit, retry, etc. are good. We can easily tie authentication mechanisms to external and other internal services without having to modify the backend.
I think that NGINX Plus could be used in place of a hardware load balancer and it would be light weight and easier to configure than a hardware based load balancer but in terms of usability a GUI for said load balancer would definitely help in setting up
Cost - the upfront cost is a bit restrictive. I've been told it is because there are a few underlying VMs that are running this service. So if you're just starting out with API management, it can be an expensive proposition. Value increases as you add additional APIs. If you're using Azure B2C for the developer portal, you'll require Standard or Premium since they support AAD integration.
Security granularity - at time of writing, APIM doesn't support breaking out operations to products. For example, if you have an API that has a GET and a POST operation, and you want the POST operation to require a different subscription. There is a work around, but it makes management a bit messy.
Developer and Publisher portal - it's a little weird. Microsoft hasn't migrated all the publisher portal functionality into the "native" Azure portal. So some of it feels a little weird - especially when working with the content management side of things for the developer portal.
Scaling - while it's easy to scale up, the cost of APIM ramps up very quickly. Standard -> Premium is a 4x jump.
We had an issue after upgrading from RHEL 7 to 8, and there were some issues that the security team imposed upon the platform with a scanning tool. We also had a VXLAN environment that was not properly sending a gratuitous arp to the network. NGINX support was instrumental to speedily resolving our issue.
It’s really pay as you go, so it's not that costly to get in and try it out. There’s no expensive client to buy and manage, but you do need to stay on top of the rapidly changing Azure environment to be sure you upgrade or adjust when needed.
It’s not great having more than one API tool, but it’s ok to spread out your work, as you always want the right tool for the right job. For example, if you are a Salesforce-heavy organization, I’d go with Mule over Azure.
It was easy getting an external consultant access to the tool to build their own API for a project they were working on for us.
We are planning by using NGINX it can greatly reduce our OPEX by 50% "just our own running APIGW" the cascading effects in the long run will be much more.