Azure API Management、AI ゲートウェイ専用ティアを公開

Microsoft has released a dedicated AI Gateway tier of Azure API Management in public preview, a gateway resource whose control plane is organized around models, MCP servers and tools rather than APIs. It was built as a separate experience rather than another layer of policy on the existing gateway, though the classic and v2 tiers keep the AI gateway capabilities they already had.

The central idea is that teams now front many providers rather than one, and the tooling should reflect that. The preview publishes Foundry-hosted models including OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral, alongside models in AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI and OpenAI directly. All OpenAI-compatible providers share one endpoint path, with the gateway routing on an exact match of the model field, so each published model needs a unique name. Anthropic is handled through a custom provider with Messages API passthrough.

Policies are configured as cards in the portal rather than XML and expressions, covering token and request limits, quotas, Content Safety and model fallback. A gateway provisions in about a minute with no scale units to plan. Telemetry is exported as OpenTelemetry token metrics to Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana, and other destinations the customer controls, and the resource runs in the customer's own subscription and Entra tenant.

For tools, the gateway federates backends from three sources: a remote MCP server by URL, an OpenAPI specification, or a built-in connector covering more than a thousand SaaS applications with no server to host. Each backend's operations become tools, and teams choose per backend whether the gateway authenticates with none, an API key, OAuth 2.0, or a managed identity.