Microsoft named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management

We are excited to share that Gartner® has positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management. This year’s placement marks the third consecutive year Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader. We believe our placement is a testament to our deep understanding of customer needs, strong customer adoption, positive feedback, and continued investments in building a differentiated platform.

Powering our customers’ digital transformation initiatives

APIs are critical to drive digital transformations in modern organizations. Thousands of the world’s largest enterprises trust Azure API Management to build, secure, and scale their API initiatives. With over a million APIs published on the Azure API Management platform today - it is a battle-hardened, production-ready, and highly scaled platform that stretches from on-premises to multicloud. Our customer use cases span a broad range from modernizing legacy applications to adopting API-first strategies to deliver innovations faster, create new revenue streams, and generate value for their customers and partners. Wegmans, a supermarket chain that re-invented the shopping experience in less than eight weeks, and Vipps, a leading Norwegian mobile payment provider that made mobile payments a norm, are examples of customers that are supercharging their digital transformation journey with the Azure API Management platform.

Delivering new capabilities for Azure API Management

Here are a few highlights of our latest features that are helping drive superior business outcomes for our customers around the world:

◉ Support for new API types: Customers can now publish existing WebSocket and GraphQL backends as APIs in Azure API Management with high-fidelity experience in both Azure and the developer portal.

◉ Support for hybrid and multicloud API management: To allow our customers to harness the power of hybrid or multicloud, we’ve enhanced the self-hosted gateway feature making it easier to efficiently and securely manage APIs hosted on-premises and across clouds from a single API Management service in Azure.

◉ Security enhancements: Security is top of mind for all our customers, and we have added several new features—private links, managed certificates, authorizations to configure, store and swap authorization tokens, and more additions that help fortify their security and compliance posture.

◉ Geographic expansion of existing Azure API Management availability regions: We have added four more regions to Europe and China, making Azure API Management available across 58 Azure regions.

Source: microsoft.com

Continue reading

Deliver Java apps quickly using Custom Connectors in Power Apps

In 2021, each month we will be releasing a monthly blog covering the webinar of the month for the Low-code application development (LCAD) on Azure solution. LCAD on Azure is a new solution to demonstrate the robust development capabilities of integrating Low-code Microsoft Power Apps and the Azure products you may be familiar with.

More Info: MS-700: Managing Microsoft Teams

In this blog, I will briefly recap Low-code application development on Azure, how the app was built with Java on Azure, app deployment, and building the app’s front end and user interface (UI) with Power Apps.

What is Low-code application development on Azure?

Low-code application development (LCAD) on Azure was created to help developers build business applications faster with less code, leveraging the Power Platform, and more specifically Power Apps, yet helping them scale and extend their Power Apps with Azure services.  

For example, a pro developer who works for a manufacturing company would need to build a line-of-business (LOB) application to help warehouse employees track incoming inventory. That application would take months to build, test, and deploy. However, with Power Apps’ it can take hours to build, saving time and resources. 

However, say the warehouse employees want the application to place procurement orders for additional inventory automatically when current inventory hits a determined low. In the past, this would require another heavy lift by the development team to rework their previous application iteration. Due to the integration of Power Apps and Azure, a professional developer can build an API in Visual Studio (VS) Code, publish it to their Azure portal, and export the API to Power Apps integrating it into their application as a custom connector. Afterward, that same API is re-usable indefinitely in the Power Apps’ studio for future use with other applications, saving the company and developers more time and resources.

Java on Azure Code

In this webinar the sample application will be a Spring Boot application, or a Spring application on Azure, that is generated using JHipster and will deploy the app with Azure App service. The app’s purpose is to catalog products, product descriptions, ratings, and image links, in a monolithic app. During the development of the API Sandra used H2SQL, and in production, she used MySQL. She then adds descriptions, ratings, and image links to the API in a JDL studio. Lastly, she applies the API to her GitHub repository prior to deploying to Azure App service.

Deploying the Sample App

Sandra leverages the Maven plug-in in JHipster to deploy the app to Azure App service. After providing an Azure resource group name due to her choice of ‘split and deploy’ in GitHub Actions, she only manually deploys once, and any new Git push from her master branch will be automatically deployed. Once the app is successfully deployed, it is available at myhispter.azurewebsites.net/V2APIdocs, where she copies the Swagger API file into a JSON, which will be imported into Power Apps as a custom connector.

Front-end Development

The goal of the front-end development is to build a user interface that end-users will be satisfied with, to do so the JSON must be brought into Power Apps as a custom connector so end users can access the API. The first step is to import the open API into Power Apps; note that much of this process has been streamlined via the tight integration of Azure API management with Power Apps.

After importing the API, you must create a custom connector and connect that custom connector with the Open API the backend developer built. After creating the custom connector, Dawid used Power Apps logic formula language to collect data into a dataset, creating gallery display via the collected data. Lastly, Dawid will show you the data in a finalized application and walk you through the process of sharing the app with a colleague or making them a co-owner. Lastly, once the app is shared, Dawid walks you through testing the app and soliciting user feedback via the app.

Source: microsoft.com

Continue reading

Easily build real-time apps with WebSockets and Azure Web PubSub—now in preview

Real-time application scenarios such as chat for streaming videos, interactive whiteboards for remote education, and IoT dashboards are becoming ever more popular. Businesses are keen to build such applications for enhanced user experiences and real-time interactions with end customers.

Today, we are announcing the preview of the Azure Web PubSub service for building real-time web applications with WebSockets. WebSocket is a standardized protocol that provides full-duplex communication. It is key to building efficient real-time web interactions and is supported by all major browsers as well as web servers. Azure Web PubSub enables you to use WebSockets and the publish-subscribe pattern to easily build real-time web applications, like live monitoring dashboards, cross-platform live chat, real-time location on maps, and more.

Figure 1: Azure Web PubSub service usage scenarios

Fully managed, globally available

Real-time scenarios often require high-frequency data flows and large quantities of concurrent connections between the client and server. For example, a finance app to visualize market data may need up to 100,000 connections and live data with low latency in milliseconds. A non-trivial infrastructure setup is required to get such functionality up and running at scale. To implement a WebSocket-based real-time experience, a developer would first need to set up infrastructure for handling client connections, establish mechanisms to scale it on demand and ensure the setup is able to meet business SLA requirements. This infrastructure management takes away a developer’s time from focusing on end-user experiences, and we built Azure Web PubSub service to solve this. The service offers built-in support for large-scale client connections and highly available architectures so that developers can focus on the application logic that delivers real-time connected experiences. 

Figure 2: Azure Web PubSub service in Azure portal

Native WebSocket support

The Azure Web PubSub service supports native WebSocket and a wide variety of programming languages (including C#, Python, and Java) through WebSocket APIs. This gives you the flexibility to build real-time cross-platform applications, and also migrate your existing WebSocket-based applications easily.

Besides the raw WebSocket support, this service also offers the json.webpubsub.azure.v1 subprotocol, which enables clients to do publish-subscribe effectively without routing data between service and backend server code. Taking the cross-platform live chatting example, the backend server code (a Web App or Function) may need to parse the client message for natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and other AI-enabled functionalities. On the other hand, action events (such as read receipt) don’t have to be routed through the Web App or Function. In this scenario, the client would send the events to targets directly through the Azure Web PubSub service using the subprotocol.

Serverless real-time applications with Azure Functions

The Azure Web PubSub service is natively integrated with Azure Functions and allows you to build serverless applications in C#, JavaScript, Python, and Java using WebSockets. Serverless solutions for real-time applications—using Azure Functions and Azure Web PubSub service—allow you to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs. Consider a location tracking live dashboard. You can use Azure Functions to integrate and process the location data from IoT devices, and then leverage Azure Web PubSub service to broadcast the location data to multiple live dashboard clients to visualize real-time location information for your customers.

Source: microsoft.com

Continue reading