What is Azure API Management and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Azure API Management
- Apigee
API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world. ...
- Ocelot
It is aimed at people using .NET running a micro services / service oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports. It manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service. ...
- Kong
Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform. ...
- NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018. ...
- Azure Functions
Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems. ...
- 3scale
3scale's API Management platform provides services and solutions, allowing you to Operate, Manage and Distribute your APIs. Trusted by 450+ API programs. ...
- Mashape
Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform. ...
- RapidAPI
RapidAPI is the worlds largest API marketplace with over 10,000 APIs available. Developers can find, connect, and manage all of their API connections through a single platform. As an API Provider, you can market, manage, and monetize your API on the world’s largest API marketplace, instantly exposing it to 1 million developers. ...
Azure API Management alternatives & related posts
- Highly scalable and secure API Management Platform12
- Quick jumpstart6
- Good documentation5
- Fast and adjustable caching3
- Easy to use3
- Expensive11
- Doesn't support hybrid natively1
related Apigee posts
Amazon API Gateway vs Apigee. How do they compare as an API Gateway? What is the equivalent functionality, similarities, and differences moving from Apigee API GW to AWS API GW?
related Ocelot posts
- Easy to maintain37
- Easy to install32
- Flexible25
- Great performance20
- Api blueprint5
- Custom Plugins4
- Kubernetes-native3
- Security2
- Agnostic2
- Has a good plugin infrastructure2
- Documentation is clear1
- Very customizable1
- Load balancing1
related Kong posts
As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?
We needed a lightweight and completely customizable #microservices #gateway to be able to generate #JWT and introspect #OAuth2 tokens as well. The #gateway was going to front all #APIs for our single page web app as well as externalized #APIs for our partners.
ContendersWe looked at Tyk Cloud and Kong. Kong's plugins are all Lua based and its core is NGINX and OpenResty. Although it's open source, it's not the greatest platform to be able to customize. On top of that enterprise features are paid and expensive. Tyk is Go and the nomenclature used within Tyk like "sessions" was bizarre, and again enterprise features were paid.
DecisionWe ultimately decided to roll our own using ExpressJS into Express Gateway because the use case for using ExpressJS as an #API #gateway was tried and true, in fact - all the enterprise features that the other two charge for #OAuth2 introspection etc were freely available within ExpressJS middleware.
OutcomeWe opened source Express Gateway with a core set of plugins and the community started writing their own and could quickly do so by rolling lots of ExpressJS middleware into Express Gateway
NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance894
- Easy to configure729
- Open source607
- Load balancer530
- Free288
- Scalability288
- Web server224
- Simplicity175
- Easy setup136
- Content caching30
- Web Accelerator21
- Capability15
- Fast14
- High-latency12
- Predictability12
- Reverse Proxy8
- Supports http/27
- The best of them7
- Great Community5
- Lots of Modules5
- Enterprise version5
- High perfomance proxy server4
- Reversy Proxy3
- Streaming media3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Fast and easy to set up2
- saltstack2
- Slim2
- Blash2
- Lightweight2
- Ingress controller1
- Virtual hosting1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- GRPC-Web1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Advanced features require subscription8
related NGINX posts

















Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.
We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.
We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.
We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job
The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server
- Pay only when invoked13
- Great developer experience for C#10
- Multiple languages supported8
- Great debugging support6
- Can be used as lightweight https service4
- Costo3
- Easy scalability3
- Poor developer experience for C#2
- Event driven2
- Azure component events for Storage, services etc2
- WebHooks2
- No persistent (writable) file system available1
- Poor support for Linux environments1
- Sporadic server & language runtime issues1
- Not suited for long-running applications1
related Azure Functions posts









CodeFactor being a #SAAS product, our goal was to run on a cloud-native infrastructure since day one. We wanted to stay product focused, rather than having to work on the infrastructure that supports the application. We needed a cloud-hosting provider that would be reliable, economical and most efficient for our product.
CodeFactor.io aims to provide an automated and frictionless code review service for software developers. That requires agility, instant provisioning, autoscaling, security, availability and compliance management features. We looked at the top three #IAAS providers that take up the majority of market share: Amazon's Amazon EC2 , Microsoft's Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.
AWS has been available since 2006 and has developed the most extensive services ant tools variety at a massive scale. Azure and GCP are about half the AWS age, but also satisfied our technical requirements.
It is worth noting that even though all three providers support Docker containerization services, GCP has the most robust offering due to their investments in Kubernetes. Also, if you are a Microsoft shop, and develop in .NET - Visual Studio Azure shines at integration there and all your existing .NET code works seamlessly on Azure. All three providers have serverless computing offerings (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions). Additionally, all three providers have machine learning tools, but GCP appears to be the most developer-friendly, intuitive and complete when it comes to #Machinelearning and #AI.
The prices between providers are competitive across the board. For our requirements, AWS would have been the most expensive, GCP the least expensive and Azure was in the middle. Plus, if you #Autoscale frequently with large deltas, note that Azure and GCP have per minute billing, where AWS bills you per hour. We also applied for the #Startup programs with all three providers, and this is where Azure shined. While AWS and GCP for startups would have covered us for about one year of infrastructure costs, Azure Sponsorship would cover about two years of CodeFactor's hosting costs. Moreover, Azure Team was terrific - I felt that they wanted to work with us where for AWS and GCP we were just another startup.
In summary, we were leaning towards GCP. GCP's advantages in containerization, automation toolset, #Devops mindset, and pricing were the driving factors there. Nevertheless, we could not say no to Azure's financial incentives and a strong sense of partnership and support throughout the process.
Bottom line is, IAAS offerings with AWS, Azure, and GCP are evolving fast. At CodeFactor, we aim to be platform agnostic where it is practical and retain the flexibility to cherry-pick the best products across providers.
In a couple of recent projects we had an opportunity to try out the new Serverless approach to building web applications. It wasn't necessarily a question if we should use any particular vendor but rather "if" we can consider serverless a viable option for building apps. Obviously our goal was also to get a feel for this technology and gain some hands-on experience.
We did consider AWS Lambda, Firebase from Google as well as Azure Functions. Eventually we went with AWS Lambdas.
PROS- No servers to manage (obviously!)
- Limited fixed costs – you pay only for used time
- Automated scaling and balancing
- Automatic failover (or, at this level of abstraction, no failover problem at all)
- Security easier to provide and audit
- Low overhead at the start (with the certain level of knowledge)
- Short time to market
- Easy handover - deployment coupled with code
- Perfect choice for lean startups with fast-paced iterations
- Augmentation for the classic cloud, server(full) approach
- Not much know-how and best practices available about structuring the code and projects on the market
- Not suitable for complex business logic due to the risk of producing highly coupled code
- Cost difficult to estimate (helpful tools: serverlesscalc.com)
- Difficulty in migration to other platforms (Vendor lock⚠️)
- Little engineers with experience in serverless on the job market
- Steep learning curve for engineers without any cloud experience
More details are on our blog: https://evojam.com/blog/2018/12/5/should-you-go-serverless-meet-the-benefits-and-flaws-of-new-wave-of-cloud-solutions I hope it helps 🙌 & I'm curious of your experiences.
- Integrated developer portal6
- Full lifecycle api management4
- Plugable api management layer3
- Separates policy definition from enforcement3
related 3scale posts
- Built-in billing layer for API owners7
- Integrated API documentation and test console6
- Issue tracking for API owners6
- User management for API owners4
- Easy setup3
related Mashape posts
RapidAPI
- Standardized API discover, connection, and management4
- Collaborate on external & internal APIs with your team3
- Market, manage, and monetize APIs as an API Provider2
- Test all APIs in browser2
- One workspace for 10,000 public API1