API Management is increasingly accepted as an essential part of any enterprise API program. It is also a key enabler of digital strategies. In a microservices architecture, you need a central hub for users to interact with services rather than having them face the complexity of individual services. A mature API management platform like Azure API Management (APIM) service consists of a set of tools that help you aggregate APIs and provides several other functions such as caching, request and response transformation, bundling responses, and versioning.

In this fast-paced session, we will discuss and demonstrate the common use cases of the API Management platform and some of the common ingress services available in Kubernetes such as Nginx, Istio, and APIM. APIM blends well with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and there are multiple ways to deploy it with AKS in a Virtual Network (VNet) as follows:

1. APIM as external g/w to AKS
2. APIM as internal g/w to AKS
3. APIM as an ingress service in AKS

We will discuss the use cases for choosing the best deployment strategy for the APIM gateway that suits your needs.