Microsoft’s enterprise API management platform for organizations exposing, securing, and managing APIs across Azure and hybrid environments, with deep integration into Entra ID, Azure Monitor, and the broader Microsoft cloud ecosystem.
Azure API Management governs API traffic at the network edge for Microsoft-centric environments: routing requests through its gateway layer, enforcing authentication and authorization policies, throttling, and providing API analytics and developer portal capabilities. That is the right architecture for protecting the provider side of an API call within the Microsoft ecosystem. The gap appears on the caller side. Azure API Management verifies that an inbound request carries a valid credential, but it has no visibility into the identity of the workload or AI agent that generated that credential before the call was made, and it cannot enforce access policy based on the caller’s runtime posture or context. Aembit operates at the caller layer. Before the request reaches Azure API Management, Aembit attests the workload’s runtime identity, evaluates access policy, and issues a short-lived, identity-bound JWT or OAuth token. When that token arrives at the gateway, it carries cryptographic proof of the caller’s identity rather than a static credential. The two tools protect opposite ends of the same API call and are both present in mature Microsoft-centric and multi-cloud environments.
Aembit does not replace Azure API Management. Azure API Management handles network-layer traffic management and provider-side API governance that Aembit is not designed to perform.
Azure API Management validates JWTs and OAuth tokens as part of its inbound policy pipeline. Aembit issues short-lived, workload-bound tokens that Azure API Management’s validate-jwt policy or OAuth 2.0 authorization server configuration validates on inbound requests. When a workload or AI agent needs to call an API protected by Azure API Management, Aembit attests the workload’s runtime identity and issues a time-limited credential. The gateway validates the token and applies its traffic policies.
The result is that the token arriving at Azure API Management carries attested workload identity rather than a static API key or reusable credential. The workload never stores a credential, and the token expires after a short TTL. Organizations already running Azure API Management with JWT validation policies can configure Aembit as the token issuer without significant changes to their gateway policy configuration.
This is particularly valuable for AI agent workloads calling APIs managed through Azure API Management: the token carries caller identity context that Azure Monitor can log alongside API Management’s own analytics, giving security teams workload-level attribution in addition to gateway-level metrics.
Note: This page covers Azure API Management as an API gateway. Azure Key Vault (secrets management) and Azure Workload Identity (workload identity federation) are covered in their respective category pages.
Azure API Management and Aembit protect opposite ends of the same API call.
Azure API Management sits inline on the data plane, managing inbound API traffic for Microsoft-centric environments: proxying requests through its gateway layer, enforcing authentication and authorization via Entra ID integration or custom JWT validation, throttling, and providing the developer portal and API analytics capabilities that enterprise API programs require. It governs the provider side of the API boundary.
Aembit operates at the caller side. Before a workload or AI agent calls an API managed by Azure API Management, Aembit attests its runtime identity and injects a short-lived credential. The workload does not store or retrieve the credential; Aembit delivers it at the moment of the request.
For AI agent use cases, Aembit provides the caller-side context that Azure API Management cannot: the agent was attested at its specific runtime environment, under a specific access policy, at a specific time. That context travels with the token into Azure API Management’s validation and logging pipeline.
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