API Management Roadmap

API Management delivers a cloud gateway and other services to secure and manage a customer’s APIs, and help client developers use the APIs. The service enables an organization to monitor APIs and enforce policies to promote security, reliability, and regulatory compliance, without building and maintaining its own infrastructure for the task.

Product: API Management

Near Term (2025-2026)

API Management receives frequent improvements. The following ones are among many rolling out or planned for 2025.

AI gateway capabilities. API Management has added what Microsoft calls “AI gateway” tools and guidance to monitor and enforce policy on traffic between client applications and AI systems. For example, it can monitor and limit token throughput (an important licensing metric) and caching of responses (called semantic caching) with the Azure OpenAI natural language–generation service. Some of these capabilities are also rolling out for the Amazon Web Services Bedrock API. A preview provides policy enforcement and developer tools for the Model Context Protocol (MCP),  a protocol that Microsoft proposes for AI agents to access enterprise databases and similar data sources.