This September marks a truly special occasion: Azure API Management turns 10! Since our launch in 2014, we've been on an incredible journey, transforming how businesses connect, scale and secure their digital ecosystems. As the first cloud provider to integrate API management into its platform, Azure has led the way in helping organizations seamlessly navigate the evolving digital landscape.
Today, Azure API Management supports more than 35,000 customers worldwide managing nearly 2 million distinct API versions and processing well over 2 trillion API requests each month. It stands as the foundation of digital strategies for businesses of all sizes and across industries worldwide. As we celebrate this major milestone, it’s time to reflect on the innovations that have shaped our platform and explore where we’re headed next.
A Decade Shaped by Customer-Centricity
At the heart of our 10-year journey lies one core principle: customer-centricity. From the very beginning, we’ve been committed to deeply understanding our customers’ needs and challenges, working closely with them and our field organization to deliver effective, scalable solutions. This relentless focus on solving real-world customer problems has been the foundation of our success and continues to guide our innovations.
Key Milestones of Innovation with Purpose
From day one, our goal has been to provide a fully managed, enterprise-ready API management service that could scale effortlessly, regardless of business size or complexity. By supporting cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, Azure API Management enables businesses to focus on delivering exceptional experiences while we handle the operational heavy lifting.
Over the years, we’ve expanded our offerings to meet the diverse needs of our customers. We started with Developer and Standard tiers for early-stage use cases and later introduced the Premium tier for enterprise-grade capabilities and security. To support a broader set of customers, we also launched the Consumption tier—a serverless option with up to 1 million requests per month at no cost—and the Basic tier, providing a cost-effective, production-ready API management solution.
Empowering API Developers
APIs are at the core of digital innovation, and developers are the driving force behind it. One of our earliest breakthroughs was policy expressions for dynamically configuring, extending, and conditionally executing policies, which made our policy engine within the gateway component exponentially more powerful and flexible. We also kept expanding our policy set throughout and now have more than 60 polices covering routing, transformation, security, throttling, caching, and more. This innovation helped businesses bring new services to market faster, enabling developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.
Every API type with Polyglot API Management
The world of APIs is constantly evolving, and we’ve evolved right along with it. Starting with support for SOAP and REST, Azure API Management now supports a broader range of APIs, including GraphQL, WebSocket, and gRPC. These additions have empowered businesses to deliver real-time, responsive services while supporting both synchronous and asynchronous API interactions.
Our synthetic GraphQL feature has further simplified API consumption, allowing businesses to modernize their tech stacks without overhauling existing systems.
Embracing Hybrid and Multi-Cloud
With the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, we recognized the need for flexible API management across environments. Our self-hosted gateway was launched to give customers the flexibility to deploy the API Management gateway component to the same environments where they host their APIs—whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in third-party data centers—and retain optimal and secure API traffic patterns while managing them from a single API Management service in Azure.
Enhancing Performance with v2 Tiers
As our customer needs evolved, so did our platform. The v2 tiers were designed to enhance performance with faster provisioning and improved scalability, while simplifying integration with virtual networks. This infrastructure upgrade allowed businesses to scale their API programs effortlessly, with minimal friction.
Empowering Teams with Workspaces
Large organizations often face challenges managing APIs collaboratively. That’s why we introduced workspaces, enabling API teams to manage their APIs independently while API platform team maintains control over security and governance. This balance between autonomy and centralized oversight has empowered organizations to move faster without compromising security.
Addressing API Sprawl with API Center
As businesses face the challenge of API sprawl, we launched Azure API Center—a centralized hub for managing APIs across any cloud, gateway, protocol, or architecture. By offering rich metadata, design-time governance, and seamless discovery of managed and unmanaged APIs, Azure API Center helps businesses maintain security, quality, and operational efficiency.
Prioritizing Security and Safety
Security has always been a non-negotiable aspect of Azure API Management. Over the years, we’ve doubled down on delivering the tools and capabilities needed to secure mission-critical APIs. Our integration with Defender for APIs (part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud) provides comprehensive security assessments, automated threat detection, and rapid response tools to combat today’s most sophisticated attacks. As API threats continue to evolve, Azure API Management remains a critical line of defense, providing peace of mind for businesses that their APIs are safeguarded against existing and emerging risks.
AI is the Future
We are at the forefront of a technological revolution where AI is making waves across industries. Its transformative power is driving organizations to harness its potential in four key areas: enriching employee experiences, reinventing customer interactions, reshaping business processes, and accelerating product innovation.
"Gen AI Gateway" pattern, extending traditional API management to AI APIs was quickly adopted by customers actively experimenting with and fielding production apps using AI. This pattern has now become an integral part of Azure API Management, allowing organizations to seamlessly incorporate AI capabilities alongside their existing APIs. AI platform engineers can now use GenAI gateway capabilities in Azure API Management to bring order and oversight to AI adoption, ensuring proper and secure use of AI within the organization. These capabilities allow for controlling usage, optimizing costs, tracking consumption, reducing latency, improving resiliency, and more.
Additionally, integration with Copilot for Azure has simplified API management by making policy authoring easier for new API Management users, enabling them to immediately start using the power of the policy engine, and making experienced users more fluent and productive.
Stories of Success: Real-World Impact
Our greatest successes are seen in the achievements of our customers. From transforming industries to accelerating innovation, Azure API Management has empowered businesses worldwide, including KPMG, Fujitsu Japan, ZEISS, Mercedes-Benz, Backbase, and many more.
Looking Ahead: The Next Decade of Innovation
As we celebrate 10 years of Azure API Management, we remain as committed to customer-centricity as ever. Our journey has been shaped by your feedback, your needs, and your ambitions. From enterprises modernizing their tech stacks to small teams transforming industries, Azure API Management is here to support you every step of the way.
We invite you to join us in celebrating this milestone and stay tuned for exciting updates throughout the year—including live webinars, learn live sessions, community events, and stories from our partners and customers.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue innovating in API management, AI, and security, empowering you to navigate the challenges of tomorrow. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. Here's to the next decade of success and innovation with Azure API Management!