Azure Weekly

Issue #355 - 14th January 2022

I want to start this issue talking about Azure API Management; in my opinion, it's one of the of the hidden gems of the Azure Ecosystem. We've worked with many customers over the last decade who have attempted to transform their organisations or deal with industry disruption by embracing the API Economy. These orgs have taken internal data & algorithms and created new business models and "coopetition" opportunities, or used APIs to break down internal siloes, or have leveraged Open Banking APIs for competitive advantage.

5 years ago we worked with the Azure APIM team to release a tech briefing on Digital Transformation with Azure APIM, and a API Maturity Model to help people to understand that embarking on the journey of designing, building, testing, deploying, supporting, marketing, metering & billing APIs can be a daunting prospect, but can be tackled by adopting a simple "assess & invest" feedback loop.

The barrier to entering the API Economy has been significantly reduced with services like Azure API Management, but the remaining challenge is how you approach designing your business model, your monetization strategy and your revenue model. You can find 100s of articles about choosing the right APIM solution, but none about the "secret sauce" that is the strategy and operational mechanics around actually monetizing your APIs... until now!

We've produced two in-depth articles: Monetization with Azure API Management, which covers the strategy & detail, and How API Management supports monetization which shows how to implement that strategy using Azure APIM. We've also created a GitHub repo that demonstrates easy to deploy examples of how to integrate Stripe and Adyen payment providers with Azure APIM, and implement & enforce pricing rules & limits. Finally, we've produced two walkthrough videos: Monetize APIs with Azure API Management Using Stripe and Monetize APIs with Azure API Management Using Adyen. Hopefully you'll find this content valuable. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

Other interesting content this week: a nice video of CI/CD deployments for Azure Container Apps and an interesting tutorial a realtime collaboration app using Vue.js and Node.js, hosted in Azure Static Web Apps. I'm a big fan of Semantic Search, and a nice new feature has been added: Semantic configurations and broader availability for Semantic Search. There's a new feature of Azure Synapse Analytics: Introducing Map Data preview for Synapse, and there's a neat little tutorial about Scanning and analyzing invoices using Xamarin.Forms and Azure.

Finally, Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2022 has been announced; it'll be running April 19-20. The Call for Papers has been announced. Submit your sessions!