APIM limits are very low

Hi Tomasz Kaniewski (EXT),

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

In both the classic tiers (Developer, Basic, Standard, Premium) and the v2 tiers (Basic v2, Standard v2, Premium v2), certain resource limits are imposed per API Management service instance.

These limits are built-in safeguards to maintain reliability, scalability, performance within a single API Management instance, cannot be exceeded within a single instance.

• For Backends and Named Values, exceeding 100 connections or configuration entries could sometimes increase memory consumption, complexity.
• V2 tiers focus on scalable units, throughput, and network isolation, rather than focusing on unlimited backend entries.

While the per-instance limits cannot be increased directly, try below:

1. Scale-Out via Multiple Units-for v2 tiers: Each unit scales throughput and load capacity but does not increase the per-instance resource caps for backends or named values.
2. Deploy Multiple API Management Instances: Create additional instances and distribute APIs or backends among them. Each instance gets its own separate quota of 100 backends and 100 named values.
3. For large-scale needs, using Premium v2 allows multiple regions and multiple service units, giving higher effective limit across instances.
4. Combine or parameterize settings to reduce the number of named values required.
5. Use an External Configuration Store: For secrets, keys, or dynamic configuration that exceeds 100 items, integrate Azure Key Vault or Azure App Configuration rather than depending completely on named values in API Management.

Azure subscription and service limits, quotas, and constraints - Azure Resource Manager | Microsoft Learn

Hope it helps!

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If you have any other questions, let me know in the "comments" and I would be happy to help you.

You can usually ask the support to increase the limit for most limitations. For example, we got the named value limit to be doubled and the operation limit to be increased to several hundreds.

It's just a matter of asking nicely and waiting for them to do their thing.