Summary

The Web API market has seen exponential growth since its inception in 2005. Over the last couple of years, the published APIs have increased to more than 12,000 and the number has been increasing each month. Web APIs have given organizations new opportunities to collaborate with partners in a secure and easy way and, at the same time, allowed for rapid development of consumer-based mobile and web-based applications. HTTP and REST provide the backbone for the Web API development, making it widely available and easy to consume. Microsoft Azure has taken special measures to expose services and provide support to easily incorporate the REST-based programming model into customer environments.

In the next chapters, we will dive into the details of the tools and techniques provided by Microsoft Azure and the ASP.NET Web API framework to rapidly build, deploy, and manage scalable Web API services.