API Gateway vs Service Mesh

Difference between an API gateway & Service Mesh and therefore the role of every in microservices and other architectures.

One of the most confusing question people have about a service mesh is, “How is it different from an API gateway?”. There is an overlap between API gateway and service mesh patterns.

Both can handle request routing, authentication, rate limiting, monitoring and service discovery but there are differences. A service mesh mainly uses for managing internal service-to-service communication, while an API Gateway primarily manages traffic from edge level client-to-service.

Want to use both ?

Of course, you can use both together. In the future, as a service mesh evolves, it will consolidate a lot of what you get from an API passage today.

The primary motivation behind an API gateway is to handle traffic from outside your system and convey it inside to service. The principle motivation behind a service mesh is to manage traffic inside your system.

My Experience

A while back, I was working on a project to migrate the ingress controller with API gateway for a product running on cloud. The primary inspiration driving it was to have a solitary purpose of the section for all the outside traffic and defending the back-end administrations, implementing network retires, authentication.

Requirement :

1. Admin UI (Developer panel)
2. Authentication
3. Reverse proxy
4. Load balancing
5. Network retries
6. Rate limiting
7. Circuit Breaker
8. Websocket & gRPC support
9. Caching (optional)

Available Options

Currently in the market many options available for API gateway based on our requirement we shortlisted a few of them on their current popularity and the feature sets they had to offer.

1. Kong
2. Ambassador
3. Nginx
4. Tyk2
5. Apigee
6. WSO2
7. Zuul (By Netflix)

Comparison :

Disclaimer — Here it does not provide any sort of performance comparison of API gateways some of the Enterprise edition features now might available in Opensource.

Personal likes :

1. Host setup on ambassador with auto SSL/TLS certificates management and termination.
2. Kong API gateway with Konga [Dashboard (Developer portal)]