Introducing Azure API Center for Centralized API Discovery and Governance

Today we are announcing the preview of Microsoft Azure API Center – a new Azure service and a capability of the Azure API Management platform that enables tracking APIs in a centralized location for discovery, reuse, and governance.

In today's fast-paced digital world, APIs are critical for businesses as they seek to create digital products, integrate systems, and increase developer productivity. However, we have heard from our customers that the rapid proliferation of APIs, adoption of multiple API tools, and the burden of legacy technologies have led to a fragmented API landscape, compromising API reuse, quality, security, and regulatory compliance. API Center is here to help manage this burden.

With API Center, you have a central hub to discover, track, and manage all APIs in your organization and foster company-wide API standards and reuse. API Center facilitates collaboration between API program managers, application developers who discover and consume APIs to accelerate or enable development of applications, API developers who develop and publish APIs, and other stakeholders of API programs.

Find any API in your organization with filters and search in API Center.

Key capabilities of API Center preview include:

• API inventory management: Inventory all APIs in your organization in a centralized place. APIs can be of any type (e.g., REST, GraphQL, gRPC), lifecycle stage (e.g., development, production, deprecated), or deployment location (e.g., Azure cloud, on-premises data centers, other clouds). They can be managed with Azure API Management, other API management or gateway solutions, or unmanaged.
  
• Real-world API representation: Capture and present comprehensive information about APIs, including versions, specifications, deployments, and deployment environments.
  
• Metadata properties: Organize and enrich cataloged APIs, environments, and deployments with unified built-in and custom metadata across the whole asset portfolio for enhanced governance and discoverability. We designed API Center’s metadata schema to be compatible with JSON and YAML schema specifications to allow for schema validation in developer tooling and automation pipelines.
  
• Workspaces: Manage administrative access to APIs and other assets with role-based access control. Use workspaces to scope permissions to teams.
  

Organize and enrich your API portfolio with custom metadata in API Center.

During preview API Center is available free of charge. Future releases will add developer experiences, improving API discovery and reusability, and integrations simplifying API inventory onboarding.

Get started with API Center. You can provide us with feedback in the GitHub repository or using the comments section below.

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