When building your API infrastructure, choosing between an API proxy and an API gateway can significantly impact your system’s performance, security and scalability. While both tools serve as intermediaries between clients and backend services, their capabilities and use cases differ substantially. Let’s explore which solution best fits your specific needs.
What is an API proxy?
An API proxy is an intermediary layer between the client applications and the backend APIs. It directs incoming API requests to the appropriate backend service, providing authentication, rate limiting, and request/response transformation features.
Benefits of an API proxy
An API proxy is essentially a lightweight, simple version of an API gateway. Let’s look at why you might want to use one:
- Granular control: An API proxy allows you to control and manage individual API endpoints separately. This is useful when different endpoints have different security requirements or rate limits.
- Security: By centralising authentication and authorisation mechanisms at the proxy level, you can protect your backend services from unauthorised access.
- Performance: API proxies can cache responses, reducing the load on backend servers and improving response times.
- Monitoring and analytics: Proxies often come with built-in analytics and monitoring, allowing you to track API usage and performance.
- Microservices architecture: For organisations using microservices architecture, API proxies enable routing requests to different microservices based on the API endpoint.
An API proxy is ideal when you need to ensure security by enforcing authentication, authorisation, and rate limiting for specific APIs or endpoints. It’s a valuable tool in microservices architectures, efficiently routing requests to the appropriate microservice.
What is the difference between an API gateway and proxy?
API proxies and gateways, both essential in API management, serve distinct purposes. Let’s consider their key differences.
| Feature | API proxy | API gateway |
| Primary role | Acts as an intermediary between clients and backend APIs, focusing on routing requests, transformations, and security | Serves as a central entry point for multiple APIs, streamlining access and managing traffic across microservices. |
| Core focus | Request routing, security (authentication, rate limiting), request/response transformation and caching | Aggregating data, load balancing, protocol translation and orchestrating complex API interactions across services |
| Ideal use case | Microservices architectures, lightweight API management, endpoint-level security and rate limiting | Complex ecosystems requiring orchestration of multiple APIs, data aggregation and advanced traffic management |
| Granular control | Provides control over individual API endpoints (e.g. authentication and rate limits per endpoint) | Provides control over entire API ecosystems, managing access and flow across multiple services or microservices |
| Security | Centralizes authentication, authorization and rate limiting for specific APIs or endpoints | Delivers centralized security, often incorporating advanced features such as encryption and oAuth |
| Performance features | Includes caching, reducing the load on backend servers and improving response times | Can enhance performance through caching, load balancing, optimizing the distribution of requests across multiple services and more |
| Monitoring and analytics | Built-in monitoring and analytics at the endpoint level, tracking usage and performance for specific APIs | Provides high-level monitoring and analytics, typically at the API ecosystem level, to track the performance of multiple services and APIs |
| Protocol translation | Basic protocol transformation and routing (often limited to HTTP/S) | Can handle complex protocol translation, such as HTTP to WebSockets or between different microservices protocols, offering higher flexibility |
| Request aggregation | Typically does not aggregate data from multiple services | Aggregates responses from multiple services or APIs into a single unified response, often used for reducing client-side complexity |
| Complexity management | Best for simpler scenarios with fewer APIs or microservices, focusing on endpoint-specific control | Designed for more intricate ecosystems, capable of managing and orchestrating complex API interactions and service integrations (including serving as a reverse proxy) |
| Caching | Caching capabilities to improve performance and reduce backend load, typically at the individual API endpoint level | Provides caching capabilities to improve performance and reduce backend load |
| Load balancing | Not typically used for advanced load balancing | Delivers advanced load balancing across multiple services and APIs, ensuring traffic is distributed effectively |
| Flexibility | Generally simpler and more lightweight, but with fewer advanced features than an API gateway | More flexible, capable of supporting complex patterns and systems with advanced features like service orchestration, protocol translation and advanced security |
Can an API proxy act as an API gateway?
While there are distinctions between the two, some advanced API proxies can perform functions overlapping with an API gateway, such as aggregation, protocol translation, and load balancing.
However, while an API proxy can incorporate some API gateway functionalities, it’s important to note that a full-fledged API gateway typically offers more comprehensive features for managing complex API ecosystems, orchestrating interactions and handling protocol translation and aggregation on a larger scale.
An API gateway might be more suitable if your requirements include managing multiple APIs, protocol translation, complex orchestration and extensive collection.
Protocol support and integration
A key part of the API proxy versus API gateway debate is considering what level of protocol support and integration you require. API gateways can handle multiple communication protocols and integrate with a wide range of backend services, providing greater flexibility than API proxies, which tend to focus on simpler protocols (usually HTTP/S).
As ever, the decision depends on your use case. If you need a simple way to route requests to different services, authenticate users or manage rate limits at an endpoint level, then an API proxy could serve you well. If your protocol needs are more complex – such as using WebSocket and gRPC for real-time communication, or MQTT for Internet of Things devices – then an API gateway would be a better choice.
API gateways are also handy because they can translate between different protocols. This enables seamless communication between services that use different technologies, supporting a cohesive cross-platform experience. An API gateway could, for example, transform HTTP requests into SOAP, or aggregate data from across REST, GraphQL and legacy systems. This provides far greater flexibility for enterprises with more complex infrastructures.
Modern API gateways also excel when it comes to integration. Whether you want to integrate cloud services, third-party APIs, an authentication server, enterprise applications, microservices or anything else, the API gateway provides a central point of orchestration for all interactions, irrespective of the underlying protocols. This gives an API gateway a serious advantage over an API proxy when it comes to protocol handling and integration.
Choosing between proxy and gateway: Decision framework
We already considered the features and use cases that set proxies and gateways apart. If it’s time for you to make your decision, be sure to factor in the following:
- Technical requirements: Undertake a detailed assessment of your technical requirements, so you can be sure the solution you deploy will be the right one for your infrastructure and needs.
- Scale considerations: Remember to play for the future, rather than simply for today’s needs. Presumably you’ll want your business to grow and evolve. In that case, your technical infrastructure needs to be easily scalable to meet future demand.
- Security needs: Undertake an evaluation of your security needs to ensure that your chosen solution meets them, today and in future.
- Budget factors: Budget is always an important consideration, so map out how much your possible solutions will cost you – in staff time as well as in terms of the software you need.
The right fit for your API management
Effective management of the entire API lifecycle and the systems that integrate with your APIs is the cornerstone of seamless user experiences and robust backend interactions for any organisation. The decision between an API proxy and an API gateway is pivotal in this management landscape.
Ultimately, your decision should align with your organisation’s specific API management needs, the architecture’s complexity, and the desired level of functionality. By understanding the distinctions and capabilities of API proxies and API gateways, you’ll be better equipped to make an informed choice that effectively supports your organisation’s API management goals.
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