Advantages and disadvantages of using API gateway (2024)

FAQs

What are the advantages of using an API gateway? ›

API gateways provide several advantages. They facilitate centralized management, making it easier to implement and enforce security policies consistently. Additionally, they improve scalability and performance through features like caching, load balancing, and request/response compression.

Drawbacks of using API Gateways

Performance degradation is a concern due to the multitude of scenarios that the API Gateway will handle and can impact the speed and reliability of your application.

API security can be jeopardized by a variety of risks, including vulnerability exploits, authorization errors, authentication issues, and denial-of-service attacks.

However, they also come with some drawbacks, such as security concerns, complexity, compatibility issues, dependency on third-party developers, and governance and management issues.

Security issues: Without a gateway, all the microservices must be exposed to the "external world", making the attack surface larger than if you hide internal microservices that aren't directly used by the client apps. The smaller the attack surface is, the more secure your application can be.

If you work with multiple backend APIs, each having its own protocol and media format, then you need a gateway to offer translation and transformation. If your business depends on the availability of your API, then you need a gateway to handle load balancing.

An API gateway centralizes and manages access to your APIs, while a load balancer efficiently distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers. This guide will directly compare api gateway vs load balancer, delineating their strengths to inform your network strategy.

But, as the gatekeeper between external client requests and your backend services, there's also a potential risk posed by an API gateway as a single point of failure for your production system.

If API Gateway fails to process an incoming request, it returns to the client an error response without forwarding the request to the integration backend. By default, the error response contains a short descriptive error message.

If the API Gateway is responsible for routing requests to different microservices, then routing failures may occur. Clients may experience delays or errors when trying to access specific endpoints or services.

How much traffic can API Gateway handle? ›

For example, API owners can set a rate limit of 1,000 requests per second for a specific method in their REST APIs, and also configure Amazon API Gateway to handle a burst of 2,000 requests per second for a few seconds. Amazon API Gateway tracks the number of requests per second.

In essence an API gateway can achieve sophisticated traffic routing between services. It can also support features such as retries on services, redirecting requests to healthy service instances, and graceful error handling.

Load balancers can help you handle the influx of traffic by distributing requests to different servers to ensure a smooth user experience. In contrast, API gateways can handle tasks like authentication and authorization, helping you create a secure online shopping experience.

It provides a single entry point and hides the complexities of services in the backend. The gateway handles routing requests to the appropriate services, aggregating data from multiple services, and applying policies consistently across all microservices. Traffic control - Load balancing, caching, rate limiting, etc.

An API gateway can also perform tasks such as authentication, rate limiting, and caching. Spring Cloud Gateway is a lightweight, reactive API gateway built on top of the Spring framework. It is designed to provide a simple, yet powerful way to route and manage network traffic to your applications.