A developer needs to connect a service to an API. The documentation says to generate an API key, store it in an environment variable and pass it in a header. Five minutes later, the integration works.

One of the building blocks of cloud-native application development is the API. By providing APIs to services, cloud applications can provide common backends to many applications across many platforms.

Microsoft’s platform-based approach to cloud development has allowed it to offer managed versions of many familiar elements of the tech stack, especially within its data platform. As well as its own ...