Microservice API Governance for AI Applications with Azure API Management

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Azure API Management (APIM) is a fully managed service that enables customers to publish, secure, transform, maintain, and monitor APIs. APIM serves as a facade for your backend services, providing a single point of governance and management across your APIs. It can help when exposing microservices as APIs or when practicing API governance in a microservices architecture, which is often the case with AI applications needing to abstract the complexity of interactions.

In this Pulumi Python program, we'll set up a basic Azure API Management instance to manage a microservice API for AI applications. This setup includes creating an APIM instance with a product, a group, and a policy to control incoming requests.

Here is what each resource does:

apimanagement.ApiManagementService: This is the core resource that represents the API Management service itself. Here we define the instance into which we'll deploy all our components.
apimanagement.Product: Represents a product that can include one or more APIs. Users need to subscribe to a product to use the APIs it contains.
apimanagement.Group: This resource represents a group of users who can be managed collectively. Groups are used to manage the visibility of products and APIs to developers.
apimanagement.Policy: These define the behavior of the API through capabilities like rate limits, quotas, or transformation of the request/response payload.

These definitions are reflected in the following Pulumi Python program:

import pulumi
import pulumi_azure_native as azure_native

# Assume we have the necessary configuration set for Azure such as location
location = "your_location"  # Replace with the actual location
resource_group_name = "api_rg"
api_management_name = "api_management_service_name"

# Create an Azure resource group
resource_group = azure_native.resources.ResourceGroup('resource_group',
                                                      resource_group_name=resource_group_name)

# Create the API Management service
api_management_service = azure_native.apimanagement.ApiManagementService('api_management_service',
                                                                         resource_group_name=resource_group.name,
                                                                         location=location,
                                                                         publisher_email="contact@company.com",
                                                                         publisher_name="Your Company",
                                                                         sku=azure_native.apimanagement.SkuDescriptionArgs(
                                                                             name="Developer", capacity=1))

# Create a product to hold your APIs
product = azure_native.apimanagement.Product('product',
                                             resource_group_name=resource_group.name,
                                             service_name=api_management_service.name,
                                             display_name="AI Product",
                                             published=True,
                                             approval_required=False,
                                             subscriptions_limit=2,
                                             terms="Your terms of service here")

# Create a group to manage users
group = azure_native.apimanagement.Group('group',
                                         resource_group_name=resource_group.name,
                                         service_name=api_management_service.name,
                                         display_name="AI Developers",
                                         type="custom")

# Create a policy at the global level
# Note: In a real-world scenario, you'd apply a meaningful policy. For demo purposes, we apply a simple, though meaningless policy.
policy = azure_native.apimanagement.Policy('policy',
                                           resource_group_name=resource_group.name,
                                           service_name=api_management_service.name,
                                           value="<policies><inbound><base /></inbound><backend><base /></backend><outbound><base /></outbound><on-error><base /></on-error></policies>",
                                           format="xml")

# Export the API Management service endpoint
pulumi.export('api_management_service_endpoint', api_management_service.gateway_url)

This program provides the scaffolding for governing microservice APIs with Azure API Management. The ApiManagementService is declared with a dummy email and publisher name, which you should replace with your own information. The Product, Group, and Policy are created in their simplest form. In a production deployment, you would define more complex policies, products with multiple APIs, and user groups with different access levels. The policy defined here is just an XML placeholder for the policies that you would want to apply to your APIs.

This program needs to be executed with Pulumi, after setting up the Azure credentials in the Pulumi configuration. Once applied, Pulumi will automatically provision the resources in Azure and give you the endpoint of the API Management Service that you can use to continue setting up your API governance.

", format="xml") # Export the API Management service endpoint pulumi.export('api_management_service_endpoint', api_management_service.gateway_url) ``` This program provides the scaffolding for governing microservice APIs with Azure API Management. The `ApiManagementService` is declared with a dummy email and publisher name, which you should replace with your own information. The `Product`, `Group`, and `Policy` are created in their simplest form. In a production deployment, you would define more complex policies, products with multiple APIs, and user groups with different access levels. The `policy` defined here is just an XML placeholder for the policies that you would want to apply to your APIs. This program needs to be executed with Pulumi, after setting up the Azure credentials in the Pulumi configuration. Once applied, Pulumi will automatically provision the resources in Azure and give you the endpoint of the API Management Service that you can use to continue setting up your API governance.