Different Tiers Available for Azure API Management

In this article, we will cover the different tiers available for you to use for your Azure API Management.

For all non-production environments, you should aim to use the Developer tier of your APIM, which supports most features at a low cost. You may need to be aware that there’s no SLA provided for APIM in the Developer tier, no scaling is available, and it works in a single region. It also can process a limited number of API requests/second, which should be sufficient for non-production workloads.

It would be best if you aimed to use (Basic, Standard, Premium, or consumption) tiers. They do have a proper SLA that would suit the requirements of production workloads. The key differences between these tiers are:

• AAD Integration: It’s supported in Standard and Premium tiers, not in the Basic tier. If you plan to use AAD Managed identities for authentication in your APIM, you shouldn’t go for the Basic tier, as it won’t support AAD integration.
• Virtual Network: It’s supported only in the Premium tier. Suppose you’re planning to make your APIM strictly for internal use within your organization, or you’re planning to host both internal and external APIs in the same APIM instance. In that case, you should go for the premium tier. The Premium tier allows you to host your APIM instance (internal VNET, external VNET, No VNET).
• Multi-region support: this is supported only in the premium tier, which allows you to have multiple instances of your APIM in different regions. Multi-region support works best if you’ve clients worldwide trying to send API requests to your APIM. In this case, it would be better to provision multiple APIM instances in different regions to be closer to your clients. Other tiers (Basic, Standard) do scale to multiple instances as well. However, all the APIM instances must be in the same region.
• Max RPS: this is the maximum number of requests your API could handle per second. Remember that sometimes it could be more efficient to have multiple instances in a low tier than to have one instance in a high tier. For example, one APIM instance in Premium tier can process only 4,000 RPS, while 2 APIM instances in Standard tier can process 5,000 RPS at much lower price, assuming you don’t require Virtual Network, and Multi-Region Support.