AI Gateway in Azure API Management Is Now Available in Microsoft Foundry (Preview)

For more than a decade, Azure API Management has been the trusted control plane for API governance, security, and observability on a global scale supporting more than 38,000 customers, almost 3 million APIs, and 3 trillion API requests every month. AI Gateway builds on this foundation, extending API Management’s proven governance, security, and observability model to AI workloads, including models, tools, and agents. Today, more than 1,200 enterprise customers use AI Gateway to safely operationalize AI at scale.

As customers accelerate AI adoption, the need for consistent, centralized governance becomes even more critical. AI systems increasingly rely on a mix of models, tools, and agents, each introducing new access patterns and governance requirements. Enterprises need a unified way to ensure all this AI traffic remains secure, compliant, and cost-efficient without slowing down developer productivity.

Today, we’re making that significantly easier.

AI Gateway is now integrated directly into Microsoft Foundry. This gives Foundry users a simple way to govern, observe, and secure their AI workloads with the same reliability and trust as Azure API Management.

This integration brings enterprise-grade AI governance directly into Microsoft Foundry right where teams design, build, and operate their AI applications and agents. It provides a streamlined experience that helps organizations adopt strong governance from day one while keeping full API Management capabilities available for advanced configuration.

Governance for models

With this integration, customers can create a new AI Gateway instance (powered by API Management Basic v2) or associate an existing API Management resource into their Foundry resource. Once configured, all model deployments in the Foundry resource can be accessed through the AI Gateway hostname, ensuring that calls to models, whether to Azure OpenAI or other models, flow through consistent governance and usage controls. Long-term token quotas and short-term token limits can be managed directly within the Foundry interface, enabling teams to set and adjust usage boundaries without leaving the environment where they build and deploy AI applications and agents. Learn more here.

Governance for agents

The integration also introduces a unified way to govern agents. Organizations can register agents running anywhere ­­­— in Azure, other clouds, or on-premises — into the Foundry Control Plane. These agents appear alongside Foundry-native agents for centralized inventory, monitoring, and governance. Teams can view telemetry collected by AI Gateway directly in Foundry or in Application Insights without any reconfiguration of agents at source. Administrators can block agents posing security, compliance, or cost risks within Foundry or apply advanced governance policies, like throttling or content safety, in Azure API Management. Learn more here.

Governance for tools

Tools benefit from the same consistent governance model. Foundry users can register Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools hosted across any environment and have them automatically governed through the integrated AI Gateway. These tools appear in the Foundry inventory, making them discoverable to developers and ready for consumption by agents. This reduces the operational overhead of securing and mediating tools, simplifying the path to building agentic applications that safely interact with enterprise systems. Learn more here.

Unified governance across Foundry and API Management

Together, these capabilities bring the power of AI Gateway directly into Microsoft Foundry removing barriers to adoption while strengthening governance. The experience is streamlined with simple setup, intuitive controls, and immediate value. At the same time, customers retain full access to the breadth and depth of API Management capabilities. When advanced policies, enterprise networking, federated gateways, or fine-grained controls are required, teams can seamlessly shift into the API Management experience without losing continuity.

With AI Gateway now part of Microsoft Foundry, teams can build and scale AI applications with confidence knowing that consistent governance, security, and observability are built in from the start. AI Gateway in Microsoft Foundry gives every organization a consistent way to govern AI - models, tools, and agents - with the reliability of API Management and the velocity of Foundry.

Getting started

To set up and use AI Gateway in Foundry, follow the steps in this article. A new AI Gateway deploys an API Management Basic v2 instance for free for the first 100,000 calls.

Explore these new capabilities in depth at Microsoft Ignite. Join the Azure API Management and Microsoft Foundry sessions. If attending the conference in person try the hands-on labs to experience how AI Gateway and Foundry help deliver secure and scalable AI applications and stop by our booths to meet the product teams behind these innovations.