Azure API Management Poor Man's Multi Region using Basic/Standard plans

0
votes

We have an application built of multiple Logic Apps. We will use Azure API Management to consolidate all those endpoints into a single endpoint.

We need this application to be highly available, so we want to deploy it to 2 regions (eg West Europe and North Europe).

As of Nov 2018, the only API Management plan that supports multi-region is the Premium plan that costs 18x the Basic plan. The Premium plan is way out of our budget.

We had the idea to setup two Basic API Management units, one for each region, having both configurations synchronized, and placing a Traffic Manager in front of both.

Assuming that we will only use the gateway functionality of API Management (not developer/publisher portal, authentication etc), what will we be missing with our "Poor Man's Multi Region" solution instead of going with the "native" multi-region of the Premium plan?

2
azureazure-api-management
Even if you were able to use API Management multi-region support offered by the Premium plan, would it really help you if the back-end endpoints of your multiple Logic Apps became unavailable due to an outage impacting the primary region? Wouldn't you have to reconfigure API Management to use the Logic App endpoints in the secondary region? - 10p

2 Answers

1
votes

Whatever you will have to build will be missing (as you pointed out):

  1. Configuration synchronization - you will have to make sure that configuration is synchronized between multiple services.
  2. Traffic Manager - you will have to have TM or something else on top of services to reroute traffic in case of DR.
  3. Scale and everything else from this list: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-management/
0
votes

It is possible to create multi region DR of Azure API Management in Developer/ Basic/ Standard tier. High level steps -

  1. Create two API Management in Standard mode. One in primary region and other in secondary region.
  2. Configure APIs and related backend in API Management primary. As you API Management standard is not part of VNET, the backend APIs will require public IP to get imported in API Management.
  3. Create Azure AD Application to have necessary permission to make changes in API Management instances in cross region.
  4. Allow rights on resource groups of both API Management in two regions.
  5. Create two logic apps. One to create backup of primary API Management. Second will be used to restore the same backup in secondary region API Management.
  6. Create traffic manager and add API Management IP address/ domains names as endpoint profiles. Configure Traffic manager in Failover/ Priority mode.
  7. Configure status page of API Management in Traffic manager to know health status of API Management for traffic manager so that it can switch to secondary region in case of DR situation.