Introducing native Service Bus message publishing from Azure API Management (Preview)

We’re excited to announce a preview capability in Azure API Management (APIM) — you can now send messages directly to Azure Service Bus from your APIs using a built-in policy. This enhancement, currently in public preview, simplifies how you connect your API layer with event-driven and asynchronous systems, helping you build more scalable, resilient, and loosely coupled architectures across your enterprise. 

Why this matters?

Modern applications increasingly rely on asynchronous communication and event-driven designs. With this new integration: 

• Any API hosted in API Management can publish to Service Bus — no SDKs, custom code, or middleware required. 
• Partners, clients, and IoT devices can send data through standard HTTP calls, even if they don’t support AMQP natively. 
• You stay in full control with authentication, throttling, and logging managed centrally in API Management. 
• Your systems scale more smoothly by decoupling front-end requests from backend processing. 

How it works 

The new send-service-bus-message policy allows API Management to forward payloads from API calls directly into Service Bus queues or topics. 

High-level flow 

1. A client sends a standard HTTP request to your API endpoint in API Management. 
2. The policy executes and sends the payload as a message to Service Bus. 
3. Downstream consumers such as Logic Apps, Azure Functions, or microservices process those messages asynchronously. 

All configurations happen in API Management — no code changes or new infrastructure are required.  

Getting started 

You can try it out in minutes: 

1. Set up a Service Bus namespace and create a queue or topic. 
2. Enable a managed identity (system-assigned or user-assigned) on your API Management instance. 
3. Grant the identity the “Service Bus data sender” role in Azure RBAC, scoped to your queue/ topic. 
4. Add the policy to your API operation: 

<send-service-bus-message queue-name="orders"> 
 <payload>@(context.Request.Body.As<string>())</payload> 
</send-service-bus-message>  

Once saved, each API call publishes its payload to the Service Bus queue or topic. 📖 Learn more. 

Common use cases 

This capability makes it easy to integrate your APIs into event-driven workflows: 

• Order processing – Queue incoming orders for fulfillment or billing. 
• Event notifications – Trigger internal workflows across multiple applications. 
• Telemetry ingestion – Forward IoT or mobile app data to Service Bus for analytics. 
• Partner integrations – Offer REST-based endpoints for external systems while maintaining policy-based control. 

Each of these scenarios benefits from simplified integration, centralized governance, and improved reliability. 

Secure and governed by design 

The integration uses managed identities for secure communication between API Management and Service Bus — no secrets required. You can further apply enterprise-grade controls: 

• Enforce rate limits, quotas, and authorization through APIM policies. 
• Gain API-level logging and tracing for each message sent. 
• Use Service Bus metrics to monitor downstream processing. 

Together, these tools help you maintain a consistent security posture across your APIs and messaging layer. 

Build modern, event-driven architectures 

With this feature, API Management can serve as a bridge to your event-driven backbone. Start small by queuing a single API’s workload, or extend to enterprise-wide event distribution using topics and subscriptions. You’ll reduce architectural complexity while enabling more flexible, scalable, and decoupled application patterns. 

Learn more: Get the full walkthrough and examples in the documentation 👉 here