After introducing MCP servers. within Azure API Management and me blogging about it, now we have A2A API support. This makes APIM a very good choice for protecting, accelerating and observing your AI apps. Obviously I was tempted to find out how this new API type can be deployed via Bicep as proper documentation is lacking.
Azure APIM is essential feature in building AI applications. Being part of that it is important to protect your APIs and couple years ago Azure has provided such capability in Defender for Cloud called Defender for APIs. Previously I have demonstrated how to configure Defender for Cloud plans in Enable Defender for Cloud Auto provisioning agents via Bicep. For Defender for APIs plan it is the same resource type Microsoft.Security/pricings but the name of the resource is ‘Api’. Additionally, you will set pricingTier to Standard to enable it and subPlan to P1, P2, P3, P4 or P5. As this is the initial configuration only in this blog post we will look at what to do next.
Azure API Management (APIM) service is one of the building blocks for AI applications. At the same time MCP (Model Context Protocol) server is one of the latest capabilities around AI. Not so long ago APIM announced support for exposing either existing MCP servers or existing APIs as MCP servers. I have played around with this functionality lately and what it turned out is that these MCPs Servers in APIM are just API resource underneath which means it can be easily deployed with Azure Bicep. In this blog post I will show you how to do it with examples.
Cloud Administrator in Azure World 