API teams and Platform teams for better API management

Chris_Noring

Microsoft

Mar 17, 2025

this article covers federated API management and how teams can work better together

This article is written partly as a conversation. As developers, we usually have questions and the idea is to lay out these questions and answer them in a conversational manner thereby making it easier to understand.

API management

Let's provide some context what API management is all about. API management is the process of creating and publishing web APIs, enforcing their usage policies, controlling access, nurturing the subscriber community, collecting and analyzing usage statistics, and reporting on performance. API management helps organizations publish APIs to external, partner, and internal developers to unlock the potential of their data and services.

All that sounds like a nice pitch, but what does it really mean? Let's break it down.

You're a developer, you build an API and you may even deploy it and you have a few users even. Then what happens? You need to manage it. By managing it we mean that you need to:

Control who can access it, this can be as complicated as you like. You may start with an admin users and normal uses and may define therefore different access levels. That's great for a while. But what if you have a lot of users? What if your API is used in a large organization, with different departments, what if your API is used in many different Apps? You need to manage all that.
Monitor its usage. Monitoring, you need to know how your API is used. You need to know how many times it's called, by whom, when, how long it takes to respond, all to ensure your users are happy and you use your resources efficiently. The latter is especially important if you have a lot of users and if you pay for resources.
Secure it. In most cases, you can't ship something without securing it. You need to ensure that only the right people at the right time can access your API and you need to ensure that your API is not misused.
Scale it. Of course, scaling is a big topic. Just put it in the cloud right? Well, yes, but you need to ensure that your API can handle the load. You need to ensure that your API can scale up and down as needed. There's a lot to think about here.

Ok, so I pick the right libraries and deploy it to the cloud, do I need a cloud service specifically focusing on API management?

Yes, well, as with everything it depends, if you feel some of the following symptoms, you might want to consider using an API management service:

Symptom 1: Inconsistent API Performance: If your APIs are experiencing frequent performance issues, such as slow response times or high error rates, an Azure API Management service can help monitor, diagnose, and optimize API performance.
Symptom 2: Security Concerns: If you're worried about unauthorized access to your APIs or data breaches, Azure API Management services provide robust security features, including authentication, authorization, and threat protection.
Symptom 3: Complex API Lifecycle management: Managing multiple API versions, deprecating old APIs, and ensuring seamless transitions can be challenging. Azure API Management services offer tools for API lifecycle management, simplifying these processes.
Symptom 4: Lack of Analytics and Monitoring: If you lack visibility into API usage, performance metrics, and error rates, Azure API Management services provide comprehensive analytics and monitoring capabilities to help you track and optimize API usage.
Symptom 5: Integration Challenges: If integrating various applications, systems, and services is becoming increasingly complex, Azure API Management services can centralize and streamline these integrations, making it easier to connect different components of your technology stack.

Ok, so know we know what to look for in terms of symptoms, but let's talk about API teams and platform teams next.

API Teams and Platform Teams

You usually don't start out with a large organization with many APIs and many users. You start small and grow your business from there. As your business grows, you may have more APIs, more users and you find the need to have different teams to manage your APIs. You might have an API team and Operations team (OPS). At some point though you start seeing problems like the below:

Scalability and Standardization: Your company is growing rapidly and needs to standardize processes across multiple teams and projects, platform teams can help create consistent, reusable infrastructure and tools.
Complex Integrations: If you're dealing with complex integrations between various systems and services.
Security and Compliance: As your company scales, maintaining security and compliance becomes more challenging.
Operational Efficiency: When operational inefficiencies start to impact productivity.
Cloud Adoption: You've started using the cloud and is not using it to its full potential, for example inefficient resource allocation.

Let's have a chat with Ella and Dave next to see where they are in their journey.

Meet Ella and Dave

Meet Ella and Dave. Ella is an experienced developer who has been using Azure API Management for a while and even workspaces. Dave is new to Azure API Management and is looking to learn more about it.

New to Azure API Management

Dave: Hey Ella, I recently signed up for Azure API Management to manage my APIs. I heard you’ve been using Azure API Management workspaces. Can you tell me more about it?

Ella: Absolutely, Dave! Azure API Management workspaces have been a game-changer for our team. They provide a structured environment for managing APIs, which is especially useful for federated API management.

"Federated" API management

Dave: Federated API management? What’s that exactly?

Ella: Federated API management is a decentralized approach where different teams within an organization manage their APIs independently. This allows for greater flexibility and responsiveness. However, it still maintains centralized governance to ensure consistency, security, and compliance across the organization.

Dave: That sounds interesting. Why is federated API management so important?

Ella: There are several reasons:

Enhanced Flexibility: Teams can manage their APIs independently, allowing them to respond quickly to specific needs and changes without waiting for centralized approval.
Improved Collaboration: Different teams can work on their APIs simultaneously, fostering collaboration and reducing bottlenecks.
Scalability: As organizations grow, federated API management allows for scalable API management practices that can adapt to increasing complexity and volume.
Centralized Governance: Despite decentralization, centralized governance ensures that all APIs adhere to organizational standards, security policies, and compliance requirements.

Dave: That makes sense. So, who are the main teams involved in federated API management?

API teams and Platform Teams

Ella: Primarily, there are two key teams:

Platform Teams: They are responsible for the overall infrastructure and tools that support API development and management. They ensure that the API management platform is robust, scalable, and secure.
API Teams: These teams focus on the development, maintenance, and optimization of individual APIs. They create APIs that meet specific business needs and integrate seamlessly with other systems.

How do Azure API Management workspace enable federated API management?

Dave: Got it. How do Azure API Management workspaces enable federated API management?

Ella: Workspaces are the only way to use federated API management in Azure API Management. It enables it through isolation of control plane, optional isolation of data plane, and platform-level governance controls.

Control plane isolation. This allows teams to independently build and manage their APIs.
API Runtime isolation. Isolate faults.
API platform team controls. Federate API monitoring, enforce policies, and unify API discovery.

Dave: So, it sounds like workspaces really help with collaboration and governance.

Ella: workspaces isolate teams and give them autonomy to more effortlessly manage APIs without running into conflicts with each other. Using workspaces enables that isolation between existing teams and future teams that will be onboarded onto the platform, which makes it easier to grow, scale, and operate API ecosystems.