Which service is essential for secure API management on Alibaba Cloud?

The service that is crucial for secure API management on Alibaba Cloud is Alibaba Cloud API Gateway. This service provides a secure entry point for managing and monitoring APIs, enabling developers to expose their backend services as APIs while ensuring security, scalability, and high availability.

API Gateway allows for features such as authentication, traffic management, and monitoring, which are vital for protecting APIs from unauthorized access and maintaining consistent performance under varying loads. It also supports features like rate limiting, which helps prevent abuse by controlling how many requests a client can make in a given timeframe.

In contrast, while Alibaba Cloud Data Hub serves as a data integration and sharing service, it does not focus specifically on API management. Alibaba Cloud Resource Management assists in managing cloud resources and permissions, which is not directly related to API security. Alibaba Cloud Function Compute is a serverless computing service that allows developers to run code in response to events but does not provide comprehensive API management capabilities. Thus, the unique features and functionalities of Alibaba Cloud API Gateway make it the essential service for secure API management on Alibaba Cloud.