Azure API Management multi-region deploy and backend services in multiple regions

Question

In Azure API Management premium tier you can easily deploy the instance of APIM to multiple other regions. As an instance of APIM contains the abstraction of a backend API, this means that the deployment to another region will still point to same the backend API of the primary region.

Does this mean a multi-region deployment is only meant as availability measure and maybe will lead to a latency improvement?

Say I have a couple of stand-alone API's deployed to Azure and I want to deploy these API's to multiple Azure regions and manage them via APIM. Do I have to deploy separate APIM instances to allow each one of them to point to the API's in that region? In that case the multi-region deployment has limited value. Anyone experience with this and how to approach it?

Answer 1

Policies may be used to direct region specific traffic to region specific backends. context.Deployment.Region should give you region in display format, i.e. "West US", "North Europe", e.t.c. Combined with choose policy that allows you to have region specific logic. set-backend-service policy will allow you to change base URL of your backend service.