At the recent annual Build conference, Microsoft introduced the preview of Microsoft Azure API Center – a new Azure service and a part of the Azure API Management platform that enables tracking APIs in a centralized location for discovery, reuse, and governance.
With API Center, users can access a central hub to discover, track, and manage all APIs within their organization, fostering company-wide API standards and promoting reuse. In addition, it facilitates collaboration between API program managers, developers who discover and consume APIs to accelerate or enable application development, API developers who create and publish APIs, and other stakeholders involved in API programs.
Source: https://github.com/Azure/api-center-preview
The key capabilities of API Center include:
- API inventory management centralized the collection of all APIs within an organization. These APIs can vary in type (such as REST, GraphQL, gRPC), lifecycle stage (development, production, deprecated), and deployment location (Azure cloud, on-premises data centers, other clouds).
- Real-world API representation provides detailed information about APIs, including their versions, specifications, deployments, and the environments in which they are deployed.
- Metadata properties enhance governance and discoverability by organizing and enriching cataloged APIs, environments, and deployments with unified built-in and custom metadata throughout the entire asset portfolio.
- Workspaces, allowing management of administrative access to APIs and other assets with role-based access control.
Regarding the API Inventory management, Fernando Mejia, a senior program manager, said during a Microsoft Build session on APIs:
With API Center, you can bring your APIs from Apigee, such as AWS API Gateway or MuleSoft API Management. The idea is to have a single inventory for all of your APIs.
Mike Budzynski, a senior product manager at Azure API Management at Microsoft, explained to InfoQ the release roadmap of the API Center feature:
API Center is currently in preview for evaluation by Azure customers. At first, we are limiting access by invitation only. We plan to open it up for broader adoption in the fall.
In addition, in a tech community blog post, Budzynski wrote:
During the preview, API Center is available free of charge. Future releases will add developer experiences, improving API discovery and reusability, and integrations simplifying API inventory onboarding.
Microsoft currently allows a limited set of customers to access API Center through a request form.