Last updated on Sep 3, 2024
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What is an API gateway?
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Why use an API gateway?
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How to use an API gateway?
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What are the advantages of an API gateway?
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What are the disadvantages of an API gateway?
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Here’s what else to consider
If you are an API developer, you may have heard of API gateways as a way to manage and secure your APIs. But what are they exactly and how do you use them? In this article, we will explain what API gateways are, how they work, and what are their advantages and disadvantages for API development.
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- Alisson Podgurski Senior Developer | Software Architect | Expert in .NET, C#, Asp.Net, Blazor | Angular | Azure
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- Piyush B. Software Engineer III @ JPMC | AWS Certified Solutions Architect |API, Cloud, DevOps, Python
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1 What is an API gateway?
An API gateway is a software layer that acts as a single entry point for all the requests from clients to your backend services. It can perform various functions such as routing, authentication, rate limiting, caching, logging, monitoring, and transforming the requests and responses. An API gateway can also provide additional features such as load balancing, circuit breaking, service discovery, and API documentation.
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- Piyush B. Software Engineer III @ JPMC | AWS Certified Solutions Architect |API, Cloud, DevOps, Python
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- I think API versioning is also one of the key features.- API gateways could also validate the requests before actually calling the service.
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API Gateway is a central component that acts as a "door" to all your backend API services. The common functionalities like authentication, rate limiting, monetization, monitoring etc. are required by all APIs, so these are usually done in the API Gateway instead of implementing them redundantly in all API services.As this component is the "door"/"gateway" to your api ecosystem, it also provides doorman services like caching, load balancing, API documentation etc.Popular solutions include Cloud gateways like Azure API Management, AWS API Gateway, APIGee by Google cloud,. Another solutions include Spring Cloud gateway, Netflix Zuul, Kong Gateway.
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- Alisson Podgurski Senior Developer | Software Architect | Expert in .NET, C#, Asp.Net, Blazor | Angular | Azure
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I recognize the API Gateway as a pivotal element in modern, especially microservices-based, architectures. It centralizes request management while enhancing security, scalability, and efficiency. By handling features like load balancing, rate limiting, and authentication at the gateway level, backend services become simpler to develop and the overall system gains in resilience and observability. A well-implemented API Gateway is often the cornerstone of a robust, scalable solution that adheres to industry best practices.
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- Yash Sharma National Level Yoga Player 🧘♂️| Skilled in C, Python, DSA---> Java 💻 | AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner ☁️ | Microsoft Certified (AZ-900, AI-900) 📜 | MERN Stack Developer 🌐 | Cloud Enthusiast 🚀 | Problem Solver 🧩
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An API gateway serves as a critical software layer that consolidates and manages incoming requests from clients to various backend services. Functioning as a unified entry point, it streamlines the communication process by orchestrating requests, handling authentication, load balancing, and often implementing security measures. Essentially, an API gateway simplifies the complexity of the backend architecture for clients, providing a centralized and standardized interface. This not only enhances the efficiency of communication but also allows for the implementation of additional features.
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- Shubham ALAVNI 4x Linkedin Top Voices | Senior Software Engineer @ Nitor Infotech | Ruby on Rails(ROR) | React | Node.js | JavaScript | Full Stack Developer | PostgreSQL | MySQL | MongoDB | Redis | Web Development
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An API Gateway is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other services. It provides a single-entry point for defined back-end APIs and microservices.Advantages include:- Simplified routing and request handling.- Centralized authentication and security enforcement.- Rate limiting and analytics.Disadvantages include:- Can become a bottleneck if not properly managed.- Complexity in configuration and management.- Potential single point of failure.
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2 Why use an API gateway?
One of the main reasons to use an API gateway is to simplify and streamline your API architecture. By having a single interface for your clients, you can reduce the complexity and maintenance of your backend services. You can also decouple your clients from your services, allowing you to change or update them without affecting the client-side code. Another reason to use an API gateway is to enhance the security and performance of your APIs. You can enforce consistent policies and rules for authentication, authorization, encryption, and throttling across your services. You can also improve the latency and bandwidth of your APIs by caching, compressing, and aggregating the data.
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- Alisson Podgurski Senior Developer | Software Architect | Expert in .NET, C#, Asp.Net, Blazor | Angular | Azure
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Using an API Gateway is crucial for simplifying and streamlining API architecture. It provides a single interface that reduces backend complexity and makes maintenance easier. Plus, an API Gateway significantly enhances security and performance by centralizing authentication, authorization, encryption, and traffic management, while also optimizing API latency and bandwidth.
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- Soumitra Bhattacharyya Integration | API Management | GCP | NodeJS | Platform Engineering
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The API Gateway offers several advantages in addition to commonly known features:* It abstracts the API backends through a common DNS.* Facilitates the deployment of a security scanner for comprehensive API security assessment across all available endpoints, ensuring uniform API security discoverability.* Improves the API developer experience by establishing a standardized approach to API authentication, authorization, and subscription management.* Enables the decoupling of backend-specific policies from consumers, allowing the gateway to transform requests and responses without requiring backend-specific implementations.
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- Sumit Amar VP of Engineering, Mobility at WEX
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API Gateways cut time-to-market, and make the APIs ready for scalability - by providing out-of-box solutions for critical and mundane problems. Most modern API Gateways offer 1) authentication and authorization, 2) distributed throttling to protect against burst traffic, 3) usage plans to offer API pricing tiers, 4) message transformations to translate data contracts from users to something different in actual downstream APIs to allow for rolling out changes without breaking contracts, 5) isolating and protecting traffic using VPC links, 6) providing native integration with downstream cloud services such as Azure Functions / AWS Lambda, CosmosDB / DynamoDB, and 6) enabling inter-service communication, and 7) allowing varying protocols.
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API gateways offer several key benefits. They simplify the complexity of microservices architectures by providing a single entry point for clients. This centralization aids in managing authentication, authorization, load balancing, and other cross-cutting concerns. Furthermore, API gateways enhance security by enforcing consistent policies and mitigating potential vulnerabilities across the API landscape.
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- Ikram Mohamed Integration Developer Lead / Trailblazer Guide
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API gateways play a key role and some of them are as below:1. Improve performance by supporting Caching etc..2. Enhanced security (Authentication,SSL,Firewall rules)3. Unified API management
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3 How to use an API gateway?
There are different ways to use an API gateway depending on your needs and preferences. You can choose to implement your own API gateway using open-source or custom-built frameworks, or you can use a third-party service or platform that provides a ready-made API gateway solution. Some of the popular options for API gateway frameworks are Express Gateway, Kong, Tyk, and Ocelot. Some of the popular options for API gateway services are AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, Google Cloud API Gateway, and Apigee. The choice of an API gateway depends on factors such as the size, scale, and complexity of your API ecosystem, the features and functionalities you require, the cost and availability of the service, and the ease of integration and deployment.
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- Alex Sheplyakov CTO at WiserBrand | Fractional CTO | High-Load Projects Expert | Driving Digital Transformation Strategies | Lifelong Learner
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API gateways serve as an important entry point, improving performance, providing more features than traditional hosting providers, and allowing you to hide the location of your actual servers, enabling seamless deployment strategies.API gateways effectively understand and validate your API protocols, ensuring that only error-free and secure requests are processed.With API gateway solutions like GraphQL, requests are stored and not exposed as plain text, increasing security by hiding the details of requests. This approach significantly reduces the burden on your development team, freeing up resources to focus on other important tasks.
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Integrating an API gateway involves configuring it to route incoming requests to the appropriate microservices, handle protocol translations, and apply security measures. Developers define rules within the gateway to manage traffic, enforce security protocols, and optimize performance. This streamlined approach simplifies the development process and enhances overall system reliability.
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👉Choose API Gateway Service: Select an API gateway service like AWS API Gateway, Google Cloud Endpoints, or others based on your requirements and platform.👉Create API: Within the chosen service, create a new API and define its resources, methods, and paths.👉Configure Endpoints: Map the API endpoints to the corresponding backend services or resources. This typically involves specifying the target URL, method, and any necessary request/response transformations.And don't forget to do proper documentation ,monitoring and versioning of your API
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- Shubham ALAVNI 4x Linkedin Top Voices | Senior Software Engineer @ Nitor Infotech | Ruby on Rails(ROR) | React | Node.js | JavaScript | Full Stack Developer | PostgreSQL | MySQL | MongoDB | Redis | Web Development
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API gateways are used as a single entry point for a defined group of microservices. They provide features like request routing, composition, and protocol translation. Advantages include abstraction of service complexity, centralized security, and improved microservice management. Disadvantages could be potential bottlenecks and single point of failure. However, these can be mitigated with proper design and deployment strategies.
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- ANIMESH GANDHI "Jobless Software Engineer, Fueled by Passion"
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An API gateway acts as a critical component in modern microservices architectures, providing a unified entry point for external requests. When choosing an API gateway, it's essential to consider not just the immediate needs but also long-term scalability and maintainability. Open-source options like Kong and Tyk offer customization and community support, while cloud-based solutions like AWS API Gateway provide seamless integration with other cloud services and managed infrastructure, which can be a significant advantage for teams looking to minimize operational overhead.
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4 What are the advantages of an API gateway?
Using an API gateway can bring many benefits for your API development, such as improved user experience by providing a consistent and seamless interface, increased security through centralized and standardized measures, enhanced performance by optimizing and caching the data flow, and easier maintenance by abstracting and decoupling clients from services. You can also tailor responses to different devices, leverage the security features of the API gateway service or platform, reduce latency and bandwidth of your APIs, monitor and troubleshoot performance issues using the logging and analytics tools, and update or modify services without affecting client-side code or breaking existing contracts.
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- Ashish Mathur Principal Software Architect at Microsoft
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An API gateway is the "front door" to any web application and some of the key benefits it brings are- 1. Abstraction of the actual APIs from the callers2. API call rate limiting - Helps in ensuring client-specific quota provisioning and also fight against Denial of Service type of attacks3. Request Logging - Get crucial info about what the incoming req. params were which led to a specific response. Quite helpful in debugging.4. Composition - You can compose the final response by internally making >1 requests to multiple internal APIs, transform the content and finally serve to the callers. Extremely helpful in scenarios where a direct API integration is not possible but composite data is needed for the final response.
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- Olusola Alao Software Engineer | Golang, Java
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Another significant benefit is the simplification of client interactions. An API gateway can aggregate results from multiple services into a single response, reducing the number of round trips a client needs to make. This not only improves the efficiency of the client applications but also makes it easier for developers to manage APIs since they can create a single, unified interface for their various services.
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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. API gateways also offer analytics and monitoring capabilities, providing insights into API usage patterns and potential issues.
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- Shubham ALAVNI 4x Linkedin Top Voices | Senior Software Engineer @ Nitor Infotech | Ruby on Rails(ROR) | React | Node.js | JavaScript | Full Stack Developer | PostgreSQL | MySQL | MongoDB | Redis | Web Development
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In our team, we use API gateways as a single entry point for all client requests. This simplifies the client-side interactions and provides a unified interface to our microservices.The advantages are manifold. API gateways provide features like rate limiting, authentication, and request routing, enhancing security and control. However, they can become a bottleneck if not properly managed, requiring careful monitoring and scaling strategies.
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- Munivel Devan Director, Full stack Engineer @ Fidelity | Java | API | AWS | Kafka | Performance Engineer | AI | Python | Technical Writer | Event Driven Platform Architect
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An API gateway provides reusable API-level functionalities such as rate limiting, request filtering, authentication, and request validation. By routing all APIs through the gateway, these functionalities can be applied centrally, avoiding the need to implement them individually in each API.
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5 What are the disadvantages of an API gateway?
Using an API gateway can provide several advantages, but there are also some drawbacks and challenges. For instance, you may experience increased complexity and overhead of your system, as well as higher costs and fees for the usage and maintenance of the service. Additionally, funneling all requests and responses through a single point can create potential bottlenecks and performance degradation, as well as expose your APIs to a single point of failure if the API gateway goes down or malfunctions.
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Another one to consider is the Potential security risks: While an API gateway can centralize security concerns, it also becomes a prime target for attackers. If the gateway is compromised, all the services behind it could be exposed to security risks. It is crucial to implement strong security measures and keep the gateway updated with the latest patches and security protocols.
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Despite their benefits, API gateways come with some downsides. One notable disadvantage is the potential for becoming a single point of failure. If the gateway experiences issues, it can disrupt the entire API ecosystem. Moreover, the centralized nature of an API gateway may introduce latency, especially if not configured optimally. Careful consideration and planning are required to minimize these drawbacks.
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- Shubham ALAVNI 4x Linkedin Top Voices | Senior Software Engineer @ Nitor Infotech | Ruby on Rails(ROR) | React | Node.js | JavaScript | Full Stack Developer | PostgreSQL | MySQL | MongoDB | Redis | Web Development
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We use API gateways as a unified interface for our microservices. While they offer many benefits, there are also some disadvantages.One major disadvantage is that they can become a single point of failure if not properly managed. To mitigate this, we implement robust monitoring and failover strategies. Additionally, they can add latency to requests, so we ensure our gateways are optimized and well-resourced to maintain performance.
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- Munivel Devan Director, Full stack Engineer @ Fidelity | Java | API | AWS | Kafka | Performance Engineer | AI | Python | Technical Writer | Event Driven Platform Architect
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1. Single point of failures2. Adding little more latency 3. Performance bottleneck - As all API requests pass through the gateway, it can become a performance bottleneck, particularly if not properly scaled or if it becomes overloaded.
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6 Here’s what else to consider
This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?
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Vendor lock-in can be detrimental issue depending on the API gateway solution of choice. There are two important points to consider here: This may limit the features that clients want to provide their users. Second, switching vendors can be difficult. Migrating away from an API gateway can be complicated and time-consuming, potentially resulting in increased expenditures and system downtime.
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When implementing an API gateway, it's crucial to consider factors such as flexibility and adaptability. Choose an API gateway solution that aligns with the specific requirements of your application and allows for easy integration with existing systems. Additionally, continuous monitoring and updates are essential to address evolving security threats and ensure the gateway's optimal performance. Regularly reassessing the API landscape and adjusting the gateway configuration as needed will contribute to a robust and resilient API infrastructure.
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