An API gateway is a software layer that acts as a single entry point for managing API calls and returning responses from API endpoints:?
- Routing: API gateways route incoming requests to the appropriate backend service.?
- Security: API gateways can help secure APIs by monitoring API usage, providing traffic logs, and supporting rate limiting.?
- Protocol translation: API gateways can translate protocols between different apps and microservices.?
- Load balancing: API gateways can serve as a load balancer to optimize API performance.?
- Analytics: API gateways can provide reports and analytics about the requests being made to any APIs in an organization's infrastructure.
- API gateways can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid of both. Major cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure all have API gateway services.
- When choosing an API gateway, you can consider things like:
- Protocols: Whether the gateway supports the protocols you need
- Scalability: Whether the gateway can scale to handle the expected traffic volume
- Security: Whether the gateway's security features meet your security requirements
- Pricing: Whether the gateway's price fits your budget?
- API gateways and their capabilities help organizations balance API traffic and workloads as the organization scales. By centralizing these functions, API gateways help streamline how an enterprise develops, deploys and manages APIs. Gateways help improve the performance, scalability and availability of apps and services and enable developers to focus more on core business logic rather than API administration.
