Azure API Management Turns 10: Celebrating a Decade of Customer-Driven Innovation and Success

This September is a special one. Azure API Management turns 10! Since our launch in 2014, we’ve been on an incredible journey, transforming the way enterprises connect, scale, and secure their digital ecosystems. As the first cloud provider to integrate API management into its platform, Azure has been at the forefront of helping organizations seamlessly navigate the evolving digital landscape.

Today, Azure API Management supports: Amazing processing 2 trillion API calls per month and Almost 2 million management apis. It is the foundation of digital strategies for businesses of all sizes and across industries around the world. As we celebrate this important milestone, it’s time to look back at the innovations that shaped the platform and see where it’s headed next.

10 years of customer-centricity

At the heart of our 10-year journey is our core principle of customer centricity. From the beginning, we have been committed to deeply understanding our customers’ needs and challenges, and working closely with them and their field organizations to deliver effective and scalable solutions. Our relentless focus on solving real customer problems has been the foundation of our success and continues to drive innovation.

Key milestones in innovation with purpose

From day one, our goal has been to provide: Fully managed, enterprise An API management service that can be easily scaled regardless of business size or complexity. Supports cloud, on-premise and hybrid environmentsAzure API Management lets businesses focus on delivering great experiences and let Azure handle the heavy lifting.

Over the years, we have expanded our product offerings to meet the diverse needs of our customers. We started with: developer and standard We introduced layers for early stage use cases and later premium A layer for enterprise-grade features and security. To support a wider range of customers, we also consumption tier—serverless option that can handle up to 1 million requests per month for free— Basic A layer that provides a cost-effective, production-ready API management solution.

Empowering API Developers

APIs are at the heart of digital transformation, and developers are the driving force behind it. One of our earliest breakthroughs was policy expressions that dynamically compose, extend, and conditionally execute policies, making the policy engine within the gateway component exponentially more powerful and flexible. We also continued to expand our policy set to over 60 policies covering routing, transformation, security, throttling, caching, and more. This innovation enabled enterprises to launch new services faster, and allowed developers to focus on innovation, not infrastructure.

All API types through Polyglot API Management

The world of APIs is constantly evolving, and we’ve evolved with it. Starting with support. soap and remainAzure API Management now supports a broader range of APIs, including: GraphQL, WebSocketand korean:. These additional capabilities enable enterprises to deliver responsive, real-time services while supporting both synchronous and asynchronous API interactions.

Our Synthetic GraphQL This feature further simplifies API consumption, allowing enterprises to modernize their technology stack without a major overhaul of existing systems.

Hybrid and multi-cloud adoption

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 provide customers with the flexibility to deploy API management gateway components to the same environment hosting their APIs—whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in a third-party data center—and manage them from a single API management service in Azure, while maintaining optimal and secure API traffic patterns.

Improved performance with v2 Tiers

As customer needs evolve, so does the platform. The v2 layer is designed to improve performance with faster provisioning and improved scalability while simplifying integration with virtual networks. This infrastructure upgrade has enabled enterprises to easily scale their API programs with minimal friction.

Empowering your team through workspaces

Large organizations often struggle to manage their APIs collaboratively, which is why we introduced Workspaces to allow API teams to manage their APIs independently.

The platform team maintains control over security and governance. This balance between autonomy and centralized oversight has enabled the organization to move faster without compromising security.

Solving API proliferation through API Center

As enterprises face the challenge of API proliferation, we launched Azure API Center, a centralized hub for managing APIs across any cloud, gateway, protocol, or architecture. By providing rich metadata, design-time governance, and seamless discovery of managed and unmanaged APIs, Azure API Center helps enterprises maintain security, quality, and operational efficiency.

Security and safety first

Security has always been a non-negotiable aspect of Azure API Management. Over the years, we have focused on providing the tools and capabilities needed to protect mission-critical APIs. Integration with Defender for APIs (part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud) provides comprehensive security assessment, 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 enterprises with peace of mind that their APIs are protected from existing and emerging risks.

AI is the future

We are at the forefront of a technology revolution where AI is making waves across industries. Its transformative power is driving organizations to leverage its potential in four key areas: enhancing employee experiences, reinventing customer interactions, reimagining business processes, and accelerating product innovation.

The “Gen AI Gateway” pattern has been rapidly adopted by customers who are actively experimenting with and deploying production apps using AI by extending existing API management to AI APIs. This pattern is now an integral part of Azure API Management, enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate AI capabilities with their existing APIs. AI platform engineers can now use the Gen AI Gateway feature in Azure API Management to provide order and oversight to AI adoption, ensuring that AI is used appropriately and securely within their organizations. These capabilities enable usage control, cost optimization, consumption tracking, reduced latency, and improved resiliency.

Additionally, integration with API management simplifies API management by making it easier for new API management users to author policies, giving them immediate access to the powerful capabilities of the policy engine, and making experienced users more flexible and productive.

Success Stories: Real-World Impact

Our greatest success is seen in our customers’ achievements. From transforming industries to accelerating innovation, Azure API Management has supported enterprises around the world. Samjeong KPMG, Fujitsu Japan, Zeiss, Mercedes-Benz, Back base) and Much more.

Looking to the Future: The Next Decade of Innovation

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Azure API Management, we are more committed to customer centricity than ever before. Our journey has been shaped by your feedback, your needs, and your ambitions. From enterprises modernizing their technology stacks to small teams transforming industries, Azure API Management is here to support you every step of the way.

We hope you’ll join us in celebrating this important milestone. Also, stay tuned for exciting updates throughout the year, including live webinars, live learning sessions, community events, and stories from our partners and customers.

Going forward, we are excited to continue to innovate in API management, AI, and security, and empower you to tackle the challenges of the future. Thank you for joining us on this incredible journey. Here’s to another decade of success and innovation with Azure API Management!