What is an API Gateway?
An API Gateway is a crucial component in modern application architectures, acting as a reverse proxy between your clients (web and mobile apps) and your backend services. It's designed to streamline application development and management by providing a central point through which all API traffic flows. Here are some of the key functionalities and benefits of using an API Gateway:
Request Routing: The API Gateway routes incoming API requests to the appropriate microservice or backend service based on the request path, method, and other criteria, enabling a more organized and efficient handling of requests.
Authentication and Authorization: It can authenticate API requests by verifying tokens or API keys, ensuring that only authorized clients can access your APIs. This adds a layer of security by preventing unauthorized access to your backend services.
Rate Limiting and Quotas: By enforcing rate limits and quotas, the API Gateway can prevent overuse of your APIs, protecting your backend services from being overwhelmed by too many requests.
Data Transformation: It can modify requests and responses on the fly, transforming data formats and aggregating responses from multiple services. This simplifies the communication between clients and services, especially when they use different data formats.
Caching: The API Gateway can cache responses, reducing the number of backend service requests and improving client response time.
API Versioning: It supports managing multiple versions of your APIs, allowing you to introduce new versions without disrupting existing clients.
Monitoring: Logging the API traffic can provide valuable insights into API usage patterns, performance issues, and potential security threats.
Fault Tolerance: It can implement policies for retries, circuit breakers, and fallbacks, improving the reliability and resilience of your application by gracefully handling service failures or delays.
An API Gateway is an essential element in microservices architectures, where it helps to manage the complexities of interacting with a collection of small, autonomous services. However, it's also beneficial in more traditional architectures, providing a unified, secure, and efficient way to expose APIs to the external world.
Why does Apiable require that we use one?
Apiable recommends you use an API Gateway to leverage established best practices in API management and optimize the management of network-level events:
Established Practices in API Management
API Management is a mature field, with methodologies and tools that have evolved to address the complexities of managing APIs at scale. An API Gateway encapsulates these best practices into a single, coherent tool, offering a range of features essential for modern API lifecycle management. These include:
Security Protocols: Implementing industry-standard authentication and authorization mechanisms to protect your APIs from unauthorized access.
Monitoring and Logging: Providing API performance metrics and operational health, enabling informed decision-making and proactive issue resolution.
By recommending an API Gateway, Apiable ensures you benefit from years of industry knowledge and practices, thus enabling you to build and manage APIs more effectively and securely.
Management of Network-Level Events
Focusing on efficiently managing network-level events is another crucial reason Apiable advocates for using an API Gateway. This includes:
Request Routing: The ability to direct incoming API requests to the appropriate service endpoint based on the path, method, or other request attributes. This simplifies the architecture and ensures that requests are handled by the most suitable service, enhancing performance and reliability.
Rate Limiting and Quotas: Protecting your backend services from being overwhelmed by too many requests. By controlling the number of requests a user can make within a specific timeframe, an API Gateway prevents abuse and ensures a fair distribution of resources among all users. This is crucial for maintaining service availability and performance under high-load conditions.
Load Balancing: Distributing incoming API calls across multiple backend services to optimize resource utilization, reduce latency, ensure redundancy, and improve system reliability.
An API Gateway abstracts the complexity of managing network traffic, allowing your organization to focus on building and improving the API's functionality rather than getting bogged down with infrastructural concerns. This strategic separation of concerns is vital for scaling API ecosystems efficiently and securely.
Apiable does not proxy your API calls! Apiable is a matchmaker between the API Provider and the API Consumer, ensuring the developer gets secure access to your APIs. This has the following benefits:
Security: Your API traffic stays between you and the API consumer. Apiable cannot view the API message.
Performance: We do not add any additional network layer or increase latency. This means you can maintain your current API performance levels.
Frequently Asked Questions
Doesn't the API Gateway come with its own API Portal?
Doesn't the API Gateway come with its own API Portal?
Many API Management providers will include an API portal within their platform. Although these portals are well integrated into their own offering, they often need more features of a modern API portal and vary in quality/look-and-feel.
Apiable recommends that you try out the portal that comes with your API Management vendor first.
Further reading: API portal: Build vs Buy as a Service.
What API Gateway do you recommend we should use?
What API Gateway do you recommend we should use?
We recommend starting with the API Gateway that comes as part of your Cloud service offering:
Amazon AWS
The Amazon API Gateway is a prevalent choice for creating, maintaining, and securing APIs at any scale.
It handles billions of API requests every year, is easy to use, and is cost-efficient.
Microsoft Azure
API Management is a hybrid, multi-cloud management platform for APIs across all environments. It is popular with Microsoft customers, but running the platform may be expensive.
Google Cloud
Apigee is Google Cloud’s native API management tool for building, managing, and securing APIs for any use case, environment, or scale. Again, like Microsoft's offering, costs may be high.
Open Source Alternative
The Kong (Open Source) API Gateway may be installed in any cloud container and is a popular alternative to the API Gateway that comes bundled with your Cloud service provider. An Enterprise edition is also available.
How many API Gateways may I add?
How many API Gateways may I add?
The number of API Gateways that you can connect to Apiable is only limited by your plan. The Enterprise plan offers an unlimited number of connected API Gateways.
Can I mix API Gateways from different API Management Vendors?
Can I mix API Gateways from different API Management Vendors?
Yes. Apiable is vendor agnostic. You can add API Gateways from many different API Management providers, e.g., AWS plus Kong, Apigee plus AWS plus Kong, etc.