AI Gateway Landing Zone What's new

Major updates by month, including release highlights and Preview capabilities.

October 2026

Full announcement: Citadel Governance Hub v1 is generally available

We are announcing the general availability of Citadel Governance Hub v1, the Layer 1 reference implementation of the AI Citadel Blueprint.

Citadel Governance Hub is an enterprise AI landing-zone accelerator that provides a centralized, governable, and observable gateway plane for AI consumption. Built on Azure API Management, it gives platform teams a repeatable way to onboard AI backends, enforce runtime policy, provide governed access to applications and agents, and attribute usage across teams and environments.

The accelerator is available from the Azure Samples repository and at aka.ms/ai-hub-gateway.

GA highlights

One governed gateway for multi-provider AI

Unified routing for Microsoft Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and OpenAI-compatible providers.
Native and OpenAI-compatible API surfaces for chat, embeddings, responses, realtime, and supported image-generation scenarios.
Dynamic model discovery and model aliases that decouple client-facing model names from backend deployments.

Contract-driven onboarding and governance

Backend Contracts declare providers, models, authentication, pools, routing behavior, and resiliency settings as infrastructure-as-code.
Access Contracts create governed APIM products and subscriptions with model authorization, throttling, quotas, content safety, PII controls, and optional layered JWT authentication.
Version-controlled Bicep parameters support repeatable onboarding through pull requests and CI/CD workflows without requiring teams to edit shared gateway policies.

Resilient routing for production workloads

Load-balanced backend pools with priority and weighted routing.
Circuit breakers, automated failover, retry-aware behavior, and configurable error handling.
Session affinity for stateful model workloads that need follow-up requests routed to the same backend.
Multi-region and business-continuity guidance for globally deployed governance hubs.

Security, observability, and cost attribution

Managed identity for supported Azure service-to-service authentication.
Central policy enforcement for content safety, PII handling, API keys, JWT validation, rate limits, and quotas.
Application Insights, Log Analytics, Event Hubs, Logic Apps, and Cosmos DB integration for operational and usage telemetry.
Power BI reporting for usage analysis, cost allocation, and chargeback by product, application, model, and backend.

Deployment, operations, and validation

Bicep-based deployment through Azure Developer CLI, with a separate Terraform implementation.
Quick-start and full deployment paths for evaluation and enterprise landing-zone scenarios.
Post-deployment guides for backend onboarding, access contracts, authentication, reporting, resiliency, and business continuity.
Validation notebooks covering routing, model aliases, multi-provider access, image models, session affinity, security policies, and agent-framework integration.
Runtime release visibility through GET /version and active backend-contract visibility through GET /version/backend-contract.

Available in Preview

The following capabilities ship with v1 as functional Preview features. Their configuration surfaces may change before general availability, so pin exact versions and validate changes in a non-production environment:

Citadel Publish Contracts 1.0.0-preview for publishing Tools (MCP) and Agents (A2A), including Foundry-hosted A2A agents, with baseline policies, usage tracking, supported backend resiliency, and optional Azure API Center registration.
Microsoft Foundry APIM connection and Foundry-hosted A2A integration, enabling governed agent access and agent publishing through the gateway.
APIM Gateway Upgrade 1.0.0-preview for applying gateway capabilities to an existing Citadel or classic AI Hub Gateway deployment without re-provisioning the surrounding landing-zone infrastructure.

Release versions

Component	Version	Status
Citadel Governance Hub	`1.0.2`	GA
Routing	`1.0.0`	GA
Backend Contract	`1.1.0`	GA
Access Contract	`1.2.0`	GA
Usage ingestion	`1.1.0`	GA
Publish Contract	`1.0.0-preview`	Preview
APIM Gateway Upgrade	`1.0.0-preview`	Preview

Get started

Review the architecture and capabilities.
Use the Quick Deployment Guide for a non-production evaluation or the Full Deployment Guide for an enterprise deployment.
Follow the Post-Deployment Guide to onboard backends and use cases.
Run the validation notebooks before promoting the gateway to production.
Review Release Version Management before adopting subsequent releases or Preview updates.

We welcome feedback and contributions through the repository's GitHub issues.