WSO2 API Manager March 2025 Release: AI-Powered, Unified, and Future-Ready API Management

For over a decade, WSO2 API Manager has been a trusted solution for enterprises looking to build, secure, and scale their API ecosystems. Organizations across industries—from financial services to telecommunications and healthcare—have leveraged its capabilities to accelerate digital transformation, streamline API governance, and enhance developer productivity.

WSO2 API Manager provides a comprehensive, open-source API management platform that supports the entire API lifecycle, from design and publishing to security and monitoring. It has helped businesses create scalable, high-performance API ecosystems that enable seamless integration across applications and services. With its flexible architecture, organizations can deploy APIs in cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments, while ensuring compliance and security. Additionally, WSO2 offers a complete API Management SaaS that leverages WSO2 API Manager’s capabilities, providing a fully managed solution for organizations looking to streamline API operations without infrastructure overhead.

With this proven track record, the March 2025 release introduces enhancements that further simplify API lifecycle management, optimize gateway operations, and improve the developer experience. In this post, we will discuss features and enhancements released for WSO2 API management software solutions. Additionally, we have another post that details the features and capabilities of Bijira, which is our complete API management SaaS offering.

Key Enhancements in the March 2025 Release

• Unified Control Plane – Manage APIs, security policies, and traffic across multiple gateways and gateway deployments from a single interface.
• API Governance Enhancements – Ensure adherence to best practices in API design, security, and compliance through automated governance and regulatory enforcement.
• Multi-Gateway Federation – Manage APIs across different API gateway types/implementations deployed across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments.
• Modular API Management Architecture – A modular approach that enables flexible deployment, independent component updates, and greater agility. Organizations can scale and upgrade components individually without affecting the entire system.
• B2B API Management – Enables structured API access and governance across multiple business entities, allowing organizations to manage API consumption, enforce policies at an organizational level, and improve API collaboration between partners and internal teams.
• AI API Management – Enhance AI model selection, traffic load balancing, and failover handling with support for multiple AI API endpoints. This ensures request routing across different AI models while improving reliability and cost efficiency.
• Kubernetes Gateway Enhancements – Improve API scalability, traffic control, and integration with AI-driven applications while optimizing performance with a more lightweight gateway architecture.
• Developer Experience and Usability Improvements – Reduce setup time and enhance security with GraphQL introspection, granular access control, and advanced monitoring tools.

Unified Control Plane for Centralized API Management

Managing APIs across multiple environments, including cloud, on-prem, and hybrid deployments, requires a unified approach to governance and lifecycle management. The new WSO2 API Control Plane (ACP) enables centralized API management, ensuring consistent security enforcement and federated traffic control across WSO2 Universal Gateway (formerly Synapse Gateway), Kubernetes Gateway (formerly APK Gateway), and Immutable Gateway (formerly API Microgateway).

This enhancement provides greater visibility into API operations, allowing organizations to enforce security policies consistently across all deployments. By consolidating API lifecycle management into a single control plane, organizations can streamline operations, improve compliance, and reduce complexity. Additionally, ACP facilitates federated traffic management, enabling centralized definition and enforcement of rate-limiting, routing, and security policies across multiple gateway deployments.

API Governance Feature

As API ecosystems grow, ensuring consistency in design, security, and compliance becomes increasingly complex. The new API Governance Feature introduces rule-based policy enforcement, helping organizations maintain high API quality, prevent security vulnerabilities, and adhere to industry best practices.

With automated governance policies, organizations can define security standards, enforce documentation consistency, and regulate API versioning. This reduces the risk of API sprawl and compliance violations, while minimizing manual intervention.

The Governance Dashboard provides real-time insights into API adherence to governance policies, highlighting non-compliant APIs and offering recommendations for corrective actions. It enables organizations to monitor security compliance, track API lifecycle consistency, and generate governance reports for audits.

By centralizing API governance, businesses can improve operational efficiency, enforce security policies more effectively, and ensure long-term maintainability of their API portfolios.

Multi-Gateway Federation – Broad Vendor Support and Flexible Adoption

Organizations often deploy APIs across multiple API gateways from different vendors. This release introduces federated multi-gateway support, allowing APIs to be defined once and deployed across WSO2 and third-party gateways, including AWS API Gateway and Solace Broker.

WSO2’s flexible adapter model enables seamless integration with external API gateways, providing a vendor-agnostic approach to API management. This architecture ensures future compatibility by allowing organizations to plug in additional gateway vendors without requiring major architectural changes, making API deployments more adaptable and scalable.

Modular API Management for Deployment Flexibility

The modular API management architecture in this release allows independent component updates, seamless scaling, and flexible deployment models. Organizations can select from pre-configured packages or tailor their API management setup based on infrastructure requirements.

This approach increases flexibility by enabling component-based deployment, reducing resource consumption, and lowering infrastructure costs. It also ensures smooth upgrades without impacting the entire API management system. A compatibility matrix and release line strategy has been introduced to ensure seamless interoperability across different components, providing a structured approach to version management and long-term stability. Users can always refer to the compatibility matrix to easily determine which versions of different components work together, ensuring smooth integrations and upgrades. The available deployment models include:

• Enterprise Package – Combines the Control Plane with the Universal Gateway for enterprises needing full API lifecycle management.
• All-in-One Package – A fully integrated deployment that includes Universal Gateway, Control Plane, Traffic Manager, all running within a single JVM, providing a simplified management experience.
• Kubernetes Package – Includes the Control Plane and Kubernetes Gateway for cloud-native API management.
• Immutable Package – Offers a stateless API management approach with the Immutable Gateway.
• Custom Deployments – Enables businesses to mix and match components based on their API strategy.

B2B API Management with Organization Support

WSO2 API Manager already supports multi-tenancy for full isolation of API ecosystems. The new B2B API Management capability introduces an additional level of isolation within a shared environment, enabling structured API consumption across multiple organizations, partners, and teams. The new B2B API Management capability introduces organization-level API governance, adding another level of isolation below tenancy, allowing structured API consumption while ensuring governance and security per organization.

This enhancement allows businesses to define independent API access and configurations for each organization, ensuring governance and security at an organizational level while leveraging shared infrastructure, ensuring secure and independent API consumption. Organizations can collaborate efficiently while maintaining strict control over their API operations, authentication, and rate-limiting strategies.

AI API Gateway – Multi-Model AI Support

WSO2 API Manager already provides AI API Gateway support with token-based rate limits, AI analytics, and secure API management for AI services such as Azure OpenAI and Mishral. These capabilities have enabled organizations to enforce fine-grained access control, monitor API consumption, and optimize AI-powered workflows.

With this release, we introduce multi-model routing, allowing seamless request distribution across multiple AI models. This new capability ensures intelligent load balancing, failover handling, and cost-efficient AI service utilization by dynamically selecting the optimal model based on performance, availability, or cost parameters. By enhancing AI API traffic management, organizations can now improve service reliability, optimize AI costs, and scale AI-driven applications more effectively.

AI-Powered Developer Productivity – AI-Assisted API Design

This release expands WSO2’s AI-powered developer tools with the introduction of AI-assisted API design. While existing AI-driven features, such as the API Marketplace Assistant and automated API testing, have streamlined API discovery and validation, this new addition takes developer productivity a step further.

With AI-assisted API design, developers can describe APIs using natural language, and the system will automatically generate API definitions, configure endpoints, and refine security policies. This significantly reduces manual effort, accelerates API development workflows, and ensures adherence to best practices. By minimizing the complexity of API creation, this AI-powered capability enables faster, more efficient API delivery across teams and organizations.

Enhanced Kubernetes-Native API Gateway

WSO2 Kubernetes Gateway (formerly APK Gateway) is a specialized Envoy-based API gateway built for Kubernetes environments, fully supporting the Kubernetes Gateway API specification. This release introduces significant performance optimizations, AI-aware traffic management, and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) controls, making it a more efficient and scalable solution for cloud-native API management.

Key improvements include reduced memory consumption in the Router and Enforcer components, lowering infrastructure overhead while delivering notable transaction throughput gains. The gateway now also supports multi-model AI endpoints, enabling traffic distribution across different AI models. This ensures intelligent request routing, automatic load balancing, and failover handling for AI-driven applications, optimizing both cost-efficiency and performance. These enhancements collectively improve API scalability, observability, and reliability in Kubernetes-native deployments.

Developer Experience and Usability Enhancements

This release introduces several improvements to enhance API usability, security, and performance.

• GraphQL API Creation via Schema Introspection & URL Import – Reduces manual effort in defining GraphQL APIs, accelerating API onboarding.
• Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for Gateway Environments – Enables precise API visibility control for different user roles.
• Enhanced WebSocket API Logging – Improves real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of WebSocket APIs.
• OAuth Proxy Support for Secure API Invocations – Ensures secure API authentication in proxy-restricted environments.
• Improved Audit Logging for API Document Management – Enhances compliance and tracking of API documentation changes.

Why This Release Matters

The March 2025 release of WSO2 API Manager brings groundbreaking enhancements in security, governance, performance, and deployment flexibility, making API management more intelligent, scalable, and future-ready. With AI-assisted API design, multi-gateway federation, modular API architecture, and Kubernetes-native API management, organizations can streamline API operations, enforce governance seamlessly, and optimize API performance across diverse environments. Whether you're an enterprise architect, API developer, or IT decision-maker, this release delivers unparalleled control, automation, and scalability to support modern API ecosystems.

What’s Next?

WSO2 API Manager is evolving to empower businesses with even more AI-driven automation, advanced security, and developer-first innovations. Upcoming releases will introduce AI-powered API governance, automated API documentation, multi-vendor AI gateway capabilities, and enhanced WebSocket support. We are also strengthening API orchestration, SDK generation, and security mechanisms. With these ongoing innovations, WSO2 continues to empower organizations to build and scale API ecosystems with confidence and agility.

We invite you to explore the new capabilities here: wso2.com/api-manager | wso2.com/api-platform-for-k8s