Since we made Azure API Management generally available in September last year with a 99.9% SLA, we've seen tremendous traction with customers of all shapes and sizes. From large enterprises using API Management to improve their internal agility and collaboration – leveraging the Developer Portal to catalog their thousands of internal APIs  – to smaller ISVs selling data and services through API Management as part of the API economy. During that time we've heard that customers want more. More capacity for their high volume API programs, more cache, more throughput, more regions and an even higher SLA for their mission critical API Programs. I'm excited to introduce the new Premium tier of Azure API Management which adds all of this, and more:

• 1 Billion API calls / unit and 5x the throughput of a standard unit
• Larger 5GB Cache
• 99.95% SLA*

  In addition to these increased quotas and guarantees, Premium also adds some killer new features:

Multi-region support

Multi-region support allows you to easily deploy multiple instances of the API Proxy to any of 15 of Azure's datacenters. We automatically configure Azure Traffic Management to dynamically route requests to the closest proxy, or in the event of an issue in a particular region, fallback to the next closest proxy. API Management's high-performance cache is already one of our most popular features – the introduction of multi-region support takes caching to the next level for high performance API Programs. For more information, see our documentation.

Azure Active Directory Integration

We've also added support for sign-in to the developer portal via Azure Active Directory. This is perfect for scenarios where you are using API Management internally, or with Partners that use Azure Active Directory. And, you can of course disable other identity systems including the social sign in support. Check out our guide.

Virtual Private Network

Many customers already have investments in virtual networks and are leveraging Azure Virtual Networking and ExpressRoute. Premium introduces the capability for you to connect each deployed region to your virtual network. In addition to our support for mutual certificate authentication, VPN integration offers a great new way to secure your backend API. Find out more here. Azure API Management is updated almost every week with new features and performance improvements. You can keep up to date on our changelog or by following our twitter account @AzureApiMgmt. * Premium SLA requires at least two region deployment and is not available during preview.