Workspaces in Azure API Management GA: Runtime Isolation and Federated Model of Managing APIs

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Microsoft has announced the general availability of Workspaces in Azure API Management, a feature designed to enable developers to manage multiple API services from a single location. This allows them to easily view and modify all their API services in one place.

Azure API Management is a fully managed service that enables organizations to publish, secure, transform, and monitor APIs. The workspace feature, released in public preview in March of last year, allows decentralized API development teams to manage and productize their APIs while a central API platform team maintains the API Management infrastructure. The GA release includes API runtime isolation through association with a workspace API gateway, ensuring that faults are contained within individual workspaces and preventing them from affecting all organization’s APIs. Runtime isolation also enables the attribution of issues and platform usage to a workspace.

Mike Budzynski, a senior product manager at Azure API Management at Microsoft, writes:

Workspaces function like “folders” within an API Management service. Each workspace contains APIs, products, subscriptions, named values, and related resources. Access to resources within a workspace is managed through Azure’s role-based access control (RBAC) with built-in or custom roles assignable to Microsoft Entra accounts.

(Source: Microsoft Learn)

In addition, regarding deployment lifecycles in workspaces, the APIOps toolkit release 6.0.2 supports automated deployment of workspaces across different environments and enables programmatic workspace management. The management API version 2023-09-01-preview provides this capability.

With the preview release of API Management Workspace, the company brought support for centralized and siloed models. In the centralized model, organizations use a single API Management service shared among multiple API teams without isolating administrative access or API runtime. Meanwhile, each API team owns and operates its own API Management service with the siloed API management model, providing full isolation of administrative access and API runtime that is missing in the centralized model.

With the GA release, Workspaces now supports a federated model of managing APIs in Azure API Management. This complements the existing centralized and siloed models and enables organizations to adopt a federated approach to API management.

Workspaces are available only in the premium tier, with Jayendran Arumugam, a Cloud Architect at Gartner, commenting in the Tech Community blog post on the GA release:

Workspaces are available only for the premium tier, which may be difficult for small—or medium-scale consumption. Even to experiment with this, we have to spin up a premium tier, which is kind of costlier. It would be great if the workspaces could be supported for the Developer tier, at least for the experimenting and test environments.

Lastly, the pricing and availability details for Azure API Management are available on the pricing page.