Web Apps & APIs
Azure App Service + Azure API Management
Azure App Service and Azure API Management work together to help organizations build, host, and expose modern web applications and APIs. Azure App Service is Microsoft's fully managed platform for hosting web apps, mobile app backends, and APIs, while Azure API Management sits in front of those APIs to secure, publish, and monitor them for internal teams, partners, or external developers. Below is an overview of what each offers and the value it delivers.
Azure App Service
Designed for: Organizations that want to build and host web applications, mobile backends, or APIs without managing the underlying servers.
What's Included
- Fully managed hosting for web apps, mobile app backends, and APIs, supporting a wide range of programming languages and frameworks
- Built-in auto-scaling to automatically match capacity with traffic demand
- Deployment slots for testing changes and rolling out updates without downtime
- Built-in load balancing across multiple instances
- Support for both Windows and Linux, as well as containerized applications
- Integrated security features, including managed SSL certificates and network isolation options
- A free entry-level tier for experimentation, alongside dedicated tiers for production workloads
Why It Matters for Your Business
Azure App Service removes the burden of provisioning, patching, and maintaining the underlying servers that web applications run on, letting development teams focus on building and improving the application itself. Built-in auto-scaling means a business's website or application can handle unexpected spikes in traffic without manual intervention, while deployment slots allow new versions of an application to be tested and rolled out safely, without disrupting the experience for existing users. This combination of managed infrastructure and production-grade reliability features makes App Service a strong foundation for everything from a simple company website to a business-critical customer-facing application.
Billing Structure
Azure App Service is billed according to the service plan tier selected. A Free tier is available for experimentation and testing at no cost, with limited capacity. Paid tiers — Basic, Standard, Premium, and Isolated — are billed based on the number and size of the virtual machine instances allocated to the plan, charged per hour those instances run, regardless of how many individual applications are hosted on them. Higher tiers unlock additional capabilities, such as auto-scaling, deployment slots, and network isolation, alongside greater compute capacity.
Azure API Management
Designed for: Organizations that want to securely publish, manage, and monitor their APIs for internal teams, partners, or external developers.
What's Included
- A managed API gateway that sits in front of existing APIs to control and secure access
- API publishing tools, including a developer portal where internal or external developers can discover and test available APIs
- Authentication, authorization, and rate-limiting policies to protect backend systems from misuse or overload
- Usage analytics and monitoring to understand how APIs are being used
- Support for both cloud-hosted and self-hosted gateway deployments, including hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios
- A serverless option that scales automatically based on demand, alongside dedicated tiers for consistent, high-throughput production use
Why It Matters for Your Business
As an organization builds more applications and integrates with more partners, APIs multiply quickly — and without a central point of control, that can mean inconsistent security, poor visibility, and a difficult developer experience. Azure API Management provides a single, secure front door for all of an organization's APIs, applying consistent authentication and usage policies regardless of how the underlying API was built. The developer portal also makes it far easier for internal teams, partners, or external developers to discover, understand, and safely start using an organization's APIs, reducing the support burden on the teams that built them.
Billing Structure
Azure API Management offers two different billing approaches depending on the tier selected. The Consumption tier is serverless and billed per API call, with a monthly allotment of free calls included, making it well suited to variable or unpredictable traffic. The Developer, Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers are billed as a flat, predictable monthly cost per scale unit provisioned, regardless of call volume, and unlock progressively more advanced capabilities — from basic production support in Basic, through virtual network integration in Standard, to multi-region deployment and the highest service-level guarantees in Premium.
Summary
- Azure App Service — fully managed hosting for web applications, mobile backends, and APIs, billed by the compute capacity provisioned.
- Azure API Management — a secure, managed front door for publishing and controlling access to APIs, billed either per call or as a flat monthly cost depending on the tier.
Azure App Service and Azure API Management are commonly used together: App Service hosts the application or API itself, while API Management sits in front to secure, monitor, and publish it to the people and systems that need to use it.
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Our team can help you identify the plan that best matches your organization's needs and guide you through setup.