Microsoft recently added a new feature to Azure API Management with Workspaces, designed to enable developers to manage multiple API services from a single location, allowing them to easily view and modify all of their API services in one place.
Azure API Management is a fully-managed service that enables organizations to publish, secure, transform, and monitor APIs. The new preview feature workspaces allow decentralized API development teams to manage and productize their own APIs while a central API platform team maintains the API Management infrastructure.
Each workspace contains APIs, products, subscriptions, and related entities accessible only to workspace collaborators. In addition, access to a workspace is controlled through Azure role-based access control (RBAC), allowing multiple development teams to manage and access their APIs separately and independently of managing the service infrastructure.
Development teams can create a workspace through the Azure portal by navigating to an Azure API Management instance, and choosing add workspace (preview). In the "create workspace" window, they can enter a descriptive name, resource Id, and optional description for the workspace. After selecting save, a new workspace appears in the list on the Workspaces page.
Developers can create and manage APIs and API operations within the workspace, including API version sets, API revisions, and API policies. In addition, they can apply a policy for all APIs in a workspace by using context.Api.Workspace and context.Product.Workspace objects in workspace-scoped policies and the all-APIs policy on the service level.
Tomasso Groenendijk, a Microsoft Azure MVP, told InfoQ:
I like Workspaces because this enables you now to segregate APIs based on different lines of business or departments in your organization. After all, the resources within a Workspace, such as policies, products, and subscriptions, are not visible to other Workspaces.
Mike Budzynski, a senior product manager at Azure API Management at Microsoft, explained to InfoQ the migration path to workspaces:
We’re working on simplifying the migration from the current API Management model to workspaces. In addition, we plan to publish an open-source migration tool for the convenience of our customers within a couple of months.
In addition, he added what the GA of Workspace would bring:
For GA, we are looking at mitigating constraints like lacking support in workspaces such as authorizations, backend, loggers, and so on, outlined in the limitations section of our documentation. Our primary focus is to provide an improved way of managing runtime-specific resources in workspaces, such as backends, client certificates, or logging configurations.
Lastly, the feature is available in the API Management Premium, Standard, and Developer tiers. Pricing and availability details of Azure API Management are available on the pricing page.