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Azure API Management

Manage every API—from traditional services to models, MCP servers, and AI agents—with an Azure-native platform with enterprise-grade security, governance, and scale.
Consolidate your API strategy with one platform built for hybrid environments, AI readiness, and enterprise control.
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OVERVIEW

Unify your API ecosystem to accelerate intelligent innovation, from services to agents

  • Manage the full lifecycle of your APIs to make them discoverable, secure, and ready for API-centric integration and agentic use. Centralize design-time governance and discovery in a single catalog to drive compliance and enable seamless access for developers and agents. Apply authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and transformations consistently across all API types—backed by enterprise-grade reliability, security, observability, and scale.
  • Manage model, MCP, and agent APIs with the same rigor as traditional APIs to drive safe AI adoption at scale. Secure endpoints, enforce rate limits and quotas, and track token usage and costs with precision. Safeguard prompts and completions, log conversations for fine-tuning, and boost performance with semantic caching to reduce latency and optimize spend.
  • Expose the capabilities of any REST API as an MCP server in just a few clicks, making it easily consumable by AI agents and MCP-compatible developer tools. Track traditional APIs, MCP servers, and agents in a centralized catalog to simplify discovery for developers and agents while ensuring safe, controlled reuse.
  • Empower developers with AI-assisted tools and experiences. Use Microsoft Copilot in Azure to author, troubleshoot, and optimize API policies with natural language. Leverage GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code to speed up API design and ensure compliance with organizational standards. Help developers and agents quickly find the right APIs with semantic search across a centralized catalog—driving reuse, consistency, and faster delivery of API-powered solutions.
FEATURES

Build, test, and ship APIs faster with tools for every protocol, model, and agent.

Trusted enterprise-ready API gateway

Manage and protect your services throughout their lifecycle with a high-performance, polyglot API gateway supporting REST, GraphQL, WebSocket, OData, and more—providing authentication, authorization, rate and quota limiting, caching, dynamic routing, load balancing, and circuit breaking, with customizable logging, monitoring, and analytics.
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AI gateway for all AI endpoints

Securely manage and expose AI models, MCP servers, and agents to developers, applications, and other agents—enforcing token limits and quotas, attributing and controlling costs, and tracking key metrics. Gain observability into prompts and completions, apply semantic caching to improve performance and reduce spend, and enforce content safety to ensure trust, reliability, and compliance. Load balance across models to maximize efficiency and resilience.
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MCP enablement for every API

Effortlessly transform existing APIs into MCP servers for discovery and secure consumption by AI agents. Centralize governance of internal and external MCP tools with unified authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and other policies. Simplify discovery through a private registry of trusted and compliant tools, integrated into Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio.
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Central catalog for traditional and AI APIs

Unify governance of traditional, model, MCP server, and agent APIs across any environment in a single catalog. Enforce quality and consistency with compliance scorecards and linting and publish APIs for secure discovery and reuse by developers and AI agents.
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Federated API management

Empower teams to manage their APIs independently with agility while maintaining enterprise-wide governance and compliance. Centralize observability, runtime policy enforcement, and API discovery across the organization.
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Enterprise-grade security and threat protection

Secure APIs with built-in defenses against OWASP API Top 10 vulnerabilities. Continuously assess security posture, detect and respond to threats, and prioritize remediation with Microsoft Defender for Cloud—delivering comprehensive, enterprise-grade protection.
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Hybrid and multi-cloud API management

Manage APIs where they run with self-hosted, containerized gateways in Azure, on-premises, or across other clouds. A unified control plane in Azure centralizes API management and policy enforcement. Use API Center as a single registry to consolidate inventory, governance, compliance, and discovery—for APIs of any type, in any environment.
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AI-powered API design and policy authoring

Supercharge productivity with AI-assisted developer tools. Use GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code to generate high-quality API specifications from natural language prompts, ensuring compliance with organizational standards. Simplify runtime policy management by authoring, debugging, and optimizing policies with Microsoft Copilot in Azure.
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Comprehensive monitoring and analytics

Gain real-time visibility into API traffic with dashboards, metrics, and logs. Monitor usage, latency, and errors across traditional, model, MCP server, and agent APIs. Extend logging to capture AI prompts, chat completions, and token consumption. Transform raw metrics into business insights with customizable reports that guide roadmap planning, investment decisions, and enterprise-wide API strategy.
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Security

Embedded security and compliance

34,000
Full-time equivalent engineers dedicated to security initiatives at Microsoft.
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15,000
Partners with specialized security expertise.
 
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>100
Compliance certifications, including over 50 specific to global regions and countries.
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Pricing

Flexible consumption, tier-based pricing to meet your varied API workload needs

  • Select Developer for evaluation, experimentation, and development.
  • Select Standard to add API management to your workload.
  • Select Premium to run enterprise-wide API program.
See Azure API Management pricing

Azure API Center

Consolidate and track all your APIs for easy discovery, reuse, and governance to maintain a structured inventory across all API types, lifecycle stages, and deployment locations.
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Microsoft Defender for APIs

Protect your APIs in Azure API Management with full lifecycle security, detection, and response.
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Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models

Build generative AI solutions with Azure OpenAI, then manage and publish them with API Management.
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Azure AI Foundry

Build and manage AI apps and agents at scale. Control and publish them with API Management.
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Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Deploy and scale containers on managed Kubernetes.
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Azure Container Apps

Run modern apps and microservices using serverless containers.
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Azure Functions

Execute event-driven serverless code with an end-to-end development experience.
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Azure Logic Apps

Build intelligent workflows quickly with enterprise-grade security and native Azure integration.
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Scale with confidence on a trusted platform for both traditional and AI APIs

Trusted by over 35,000 customers worldwide. Built on 10+ years of innovation. Managing 2 million APIs. Processing 3 trillion requests monthly. Available in over 60 regions.
Read about our decade-long journey
CUSTOMER STORIES

Get insights from leading brands

Discover how organizations are driving innovation with our solutions.
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RESOURCES

Get started with Azure API Management

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Learn

Deep dive into API Management

Explore key concepts and hands-on quickstarts on Microsoft Learn.
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Learn

Explore AI gateway capabilities

Explore how API Management can help you manage AI APIs, including models, agents, and MCP servers.
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Updates

Azure API Management product updates

Get the latest updates on API Management features and releases.
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Training

Get hands-on training with API Management

Discover how API Management empowers you to build secure, scalable API solutions for your applications.
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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

  • API management is the practice of securing, governing, and monitoring APIs—traditional services, AI models, MCP servers, and agents—so they can be discovered, reused, and integrated consistently across teams and environments.
  • Azure API Management is a fully managed, Azure-native platform used to secure, govern, and scale traditional and AI APIs throughout their lifecycle, with centralized discovery, observability, and policy enforcement.
  • AI APIs expose models, agents, and tools that need safeguards. Management ensures secure access, cost control, prompt and content safety, rate limits, and consistent governance—enabling safe, scalable AI adoption.
  • Azure API Management is an AI gateway to expose and govern models, MCP servers, and agents. Transform APIs into MCP servers or mediate existing tools to enable agents with policies for authentication, authorization, and rate limits. For models, enforce token quotas, semantic caching, and content safety. API Center provides a unified MCP tools registry with integration into Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Copilot Studio.
  • Policies are rules applied to APIs at runtime. In Azure API Management, they control authentication, authorization, throttling, transformations, content validation, and more. Thanks to Microsoft Copilot in Azure, you can easily author them using natural language prompts.
  • Yes. With self-hosted gateways, you can manage APIs wherever they run—on-premises, in Azure, or in other clouds—while centralizing policies, observability, and governance in one Azure-native control plane.
  • Azure API Management enables teams to manage APIs independently with workspaces while centralizing observability, policy enforcement, and discovery across the enterprise—for everything from traditional services (REST, GraphQL, SOAP, gRPC, OData) to AI models, MCP servers, and agents. API Center extends this with a unified registry for inventory, compliance, and reuse—even for APIs managed outside Azure.
  • API Management secures and governs APIs at runtime. API Center complements it with a centralized registry for all APIs—of any type or deployment location—enabling inventory, design compliance, and reuse across environments.
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