Products basics for API Management

Products are the means for exposing APIs for the developers. In order to add a product, go to Products tab on the API menu.

You can see already two products there. They basically show up the possibility of limiting the quotas to be used by the developers. Unlimited one does not has any restrictions applied, but the Starter has a rate limit and a quota limit policies applied under its policies.

The whole scope of policies will be covered in a later article, but for the moment lets get to know there are possibilities for applying policies. 

Creating a new product is easy as shown in the image below. 

Here you can specify the name, id and description along with the status, whether a subscription key is required, whether an administrator approval is required. Then you can specify the set of APIs that need to fall under it. For the moment I am creating a product without requiring a subscription. 

Once you created, you can change the settings at any given time. You can make it require a subscription and assign subscribers easily. 

Once a subscription is set, you need to send the subscription key in order to authenticate the request and go to the next layers. In next article, I will explain the APIs.