Microsoft recently announced the public preview of two new Azure API Management tiers: Basic v2 and Standard v2.
Azure API Management is Microsoft’s API Gateway offering in the Cloud and provides customers with various tiers based on workloads and features. The new Basic V2 tier is designed for development and testing scenarios. It is supported by an SLA. At the same time, the new Standard V2 is a production-ready tier with support planned for advanced API Management features previously available only in a Premium tier of API Management, including high availability and networking options.
One of the benefits of Standard V2 is that an instance of API Management is deployed in minutes and supports Virtual Network (VNet) Integration - allowing outbound traffic to be restricted to a single connected VNet. In addition, both Basic and Standard V2 support up to 10 scale units, a 5X and 2.5X improvement over the current Basic and Standard tiers.
Toon Vanhoutte, a Microsoft MVP, outlined in one of his blog posts the features of the new tiers and concluded:
With the new Standard v2 tier, we can privatize API Management for 1/4 of the premium price. Be aware that the load that is single Standard v2 unit can handle is probably lower than what the Premium tier can manage. Another remark is that the price for Standard v2 includes 50M API requests per month and that you have to pay per extra bucket of 1M API requests.
Fernando Mejia, a Senior Program Manager - Azure API Management at Microsoft, explains In a Tech Community blog post the reason for the new tiers:
The new tiers answer popular customer requests, offer quality-of-service improvements, and allow customers of any size to get started with API Management, adding capabilities and scale as their API programs grow.
In addition, on a LinkedIn post from Mejia about the new tiers, Sathish Krishnan, a Distinguished Engineer and director of Cloud Engineering at UBS, commented:
Much awaited update. Having to pay premium for VNet integration was a costly proposition.
In a dev.to blog post, the author Matonen writes:
Pricing of the Premium tier is €3.65 per hour, so Standard v2 is 4 times cheaper. Now, even small organizations can consider API management and deploy backends to private network.
Lastly, during the preview phase, the Basic v2 and Standard v2 tiers are accessible in select public regions for newly created service instances. The pricing details of all API Management tiers are available on the pricing page.