Arin's Tech Musings

 Azure API Management offers caching possibilities to improve performance.  There are 2 caching options: Response Caching - Useful for caching entire HTTP responses Value Caching - To cache arbitrary pieces of data from within policy definitions. When it comes to the actual store, APIM supports: Built-in cache External Redis Compatible cache In this blog I will focus on how to manage "Value Caching". How do we set/retrieve/delete values using APIM policies? Typically, Value storage is used for fragment caching - where responses contain data that is expensive to determine and yet remains fresh for a reasonable amount of time. Also, within the APIM policies, we want to cache certain values e.g. OAuth tokens, key-vault secrets, etc. because these remain relatively fresh for a longer period of time. With caching comes the need to manage the cache specially when you need to clear cached values because they are stale.  In some scenarios, where OAuth tokens or secrets are cached, yo

 When hosting APIs in Azure it is more and more common to make them available for consumption via an API Management Gateway. The advantages of using a API Management gateway are well known.  When adding a Function/WebAPI to an API Management gateway, the most common method is to add the Function/WebAPI as a backend in API Management and then exposing the Function/WebAPI as an API that uses this backend to process requests. There is a very simple way to do this using the Azure Portal. The portal allows connecting an existing Function or WebAPI inside the API Management gateway.  The portal now also allows to expose a function/web api from the action pane of functions and web api. While this makes it very easy to add APIs to API Management gateway using the portal, this would very soon become unmanageable and for more complex and automated environments, the obvious tilt would then be towards a automated deployment using one of the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) possibilities. In this examp