Forum Discussion
Downtime of API Management during deployment
Which actions will cause a downtime of Azure API Management so APIs will not be able to consume (Premium Tier)? E.g. changing network would be obviously. But what about deployments of APIs, Produ...
For Premium (and the other production tiers), most control-plane operations are rolled out in a way that keeps the gateway processing traffic. The “Upgrade and scale an Azure API Management instance” article explicitly states that infrastructure changes such as scaling, custom domains, vNet config, etc. are applied as rolling updates and the gateway keeps serving requests, except for the Developer tier. Microsoft Learn
In practice, what we plan for is:
- Short windows with reduced capacity while units are updated, based on the capacity metric guidance (watch for sustained values above ~60–70% before you change units or tier). Microsoft Learn
- Possible brief impact when doing bigger changes like vNet integration or region adds, so we schedule those in low-traffic periods. Microsoft Learn+1
If you need an even tighter availability posture, you can combine Premium with multi-region deployment and a traffic manager / Front Door layer in front of APIM, so you can drain one region while the other keeps serving traffic. Microsoft Learn+1