Azure API Management

Description:

So my organization needed a way to send API calls to a third party application that required a static IP from us outbound so they could whitelist inbound. We ended up using Azure API management to accomplish this. To further clarify, you can have Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Azure $x call this API management endpoint and it will forward the API calls to a third party. This is a huge win since most organizations I work with will want a single IP to whitelist. This allows me to send API payloads from many Azure tools and only provide a single IP to a third party vendor. If only there was a way to do this with binary files (SFTP transfers without a virtual machine) as well…

To Resolve:

1. First, deploy an instance in the Azure portal.
2. This takes a while. After it is done, in the Azure Portal go to:
   • API’s blade => Echo API => Settings tab => Take note of Web Service: http://echoapi.cloudapp.net/api.
3. For your organizations API’s, you will replace this with the base URI of the endpoint you want to connect to. For example, for Service Now this is yourcompany.service-now.com/api. Let’s go ahead and create it:
   • In API’s blade => Click Add API => Type
     • SN Test as display name
     • SN-Test as name
     • https://yourcompany.service-now.com/api for Web Service URL
     • /sn-test/ as the API URL Suffix. This is the first part of the URL you will hit to go to SN Test e.g. https://my-org.azure-api.net/sn-test/
   • On the same blade, go to Design tab. This lists all the operations you can perform on your API.
     • Click Add Operation => Name it Get Request => On Front End => Edit => URL GET /now/table/sc_request => Save
   • On the same blade, go to the Test tab. Click on Get Request and click on the eye icon in bottom right to get the Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key under the HTTP Request section. We will need this to test from Postman.
4. Now inside Postman:
   • Set operation to GET
   • Set URL to https://my-org.azure-api.net/sn-test/now/table/sc_request?sysparm_query=sys_id%3D1e04601adb2ad0106b29d411ce96199e
     • First part https://my-org.azure-api.net/sn-test/ is your API Management instance which redirects to the API you just created
     • Second part /now/table/sc_request is how to hit SN Request table via API.
     • Last part ?sysparm_query=sys_id%3D1e04601adb2ad0106b29d411ce96199e is a query put in any SN sys Id you want.
   • Under Authorization tab, setup what your organization uses. We use Basic so I put in Username/Password of our API user.
   • Under Headers tab, put in Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key and Ocp-Apim-Trace as keys and values are what you copied as the key and true.
   • Send it. Should be good to go!
5. At this stage, you can keep adding API endpoints and operations as you see fit. But what if you already have some as Postman collections? Well that is where you need to use OpenMan to convert Postman 2.1 collections to OpenAPI spec for Azure API Management. I had to do this so this is what I did:
   • Export v2.1 in Postman to c:\scripts
   • In wsl:
     • Type: pip3 install openman
     • Type: openman convert /mnt/c/scripts/p.json /mnt/c/scripts/spec2.yaml
   • Inside Azure API Management portal, go to API’s => Add API => OpenAPI Spec => Browse => Upload the yml file, ignore errors
6. At this point, you should be good to go but wanted to include some additional info: To learn more about API Management, what I did was click on Echo API and went to Design tab => Post Create Resource => FrontEnd => Edit => Then looked at bottom sections: Template, Query, Headers, Request, Responses.
   • These are similar to Postman tabs. Inside each one you put a key and an example. For example, go to the Request sub-tab:
     • Type: application/json under Content-Type
     • Type {"vehicleType": "train","maxSpeed": 125,"avgSpeed": 90,"speedUnit": "mph"} under Sample
     • Save
   • In Postman
     • Set operation to POST
     • Set endpoint to https://my-org.azure-api.net/echo/resource
     • Set headers to:
       • Content-Type: application/json
       • Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: mykey-89de6714c26795e09
       • Ocp-Apim-Trace: true
     • Set body to:

     {
     "vehicleType": "train-blahblahblah",
     "maxSpeed": 125,
     "avgSpeed": 90,
     "speedUnit": "mph"
     }
     

     • Send => Response should come back with a json object with a vehicleType of train-blahblahblah
   • Now replace url with: http://echoapi.cloudapp.net/api/resource => Delete the subscription headers and send again => should get the same thing. Get it?