The underlying numbers are impressive: more than 35,000 customers, 2 million managed APIs, and 2.2 trillion calls a month, with significant yearly growth across all three metrics. Vinogradsky attributes this to being customer-led. He says, “You wouldn’t believe the amount of time the team spends interacting with customers directly, working with our field teams to understand customer concerns, customer scenarios.” That is a more complex task than it first seems, as it requires translating customer conversations about missing features to actual customer needs, understanding what they are trying to do with APIs in their business.
This approach has allowed the service to add new features to its underlying gateway architecture. Vinogradsky notes, “We added support for expressions with which you can now conditionally execute, parameterize, and customize built-in policies which essentially exponentially improved the power and flexibility of the gateway right to the degree that customers can use it for a lot of things that we didn’t even think were possible.”
Azure API Management is competitively priced, with a mix of tiers that target different use cases, from developers experimenting with the service to organizations using it to securely handle millions of transactions every day. There’s even a serverless consumption tier that gives you a million free calls a month, which is an attractive option for small and medium enterprises that want to control internal API usage.