Beyond API Gateways...

APIs(Application programming interfaces) are everywhere.

API gain its popularity in last few years because of following benefits they offer:

• API Governance - Enforcing security rules, standards and policies on APIs
• Standardization - The APIs are standardized following certain structure and protocols (example - rest)
• Reusability - APIs can be easily reused by other applications or services. Saving development efforts and avoid duplication of services
• Discovery - It's the ability to search APIs, with API management tools it becomes easy to find APIs
• Monetization - To monetize APIs and generate revenue. Example - Instagram offers different plans for the UserEndpoint APIs.

So, most of the application development revolves around the APIs. I have seen many organizations have thousands of APIs which make it complex for developers to discover it. So, the developers or architects can not reap the benefits of the APIs they are supposed to offer. The situation is worsening with daily addition of new APIs.

It's time for organizations to think on our API first strategy and revisit it. Derive the strategies other than API gateway to simplify the application integrations.

Below tools can help architects to think 'Beyond API Gateways':

• Service Mesh - As per Wikipedia definition of service mesh is "a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between services or microservices, using a proxy"

Service Mesh provides a dedicated communication layer for better observability, secure connections and exception handling logic. Service mesh also provides features such as load balancing, traffic routing, and security, similar to API gateway.

• Event Driven Architectures : It is not necessary that every API should be http triggered or REST API. We can use events to trigger and setup communication between decoupled services. Event driven architecture is popular amongst the cloud native developers and microservices development.
• Function as a Service (FaaS): FaaS platforms like AWS lambda or Azure functions can be directly used to create lightweight APIs without need of the API gateways. Cloud service providers also offer the authentication and governance policies to be used with FaaS. FaaS is an easy to use, low cost development service offerings without need of managing any infrastructure.
• Direct API communications : In some cases we can also go for the direct API to API communications which provide better speed and less overhead of API gateway onboarding. This approach comes with security constraints and can be evaluated on case to case basis.

Conclusion : APIs are integral part of software development and API gateways are always a powerful tool to manage APIs. But depending on complexity, implementation and governance required different solution can add more value than API gateways. It's time to think beyond the API gateways and leverage Service Mesh, event driven architectures.