The service mesh v/s APIM debate: What you should know for your API first business
Duration 60min
In this edition of the great API debate, join Sedky Abou-Shamalah, Director Solution Architecture, Ahmet Soormally, Head of Research, and Budha, Product Evangelist at Tyk as we unpack the similarities and differences between the two, answering some of your most burning questions such as:
- If I adopt a service mesh approach to applications, do I still need an API gateway?
- If I already have an API gateway, should I bother with service mesh?
- I can’t possibly use both, can I?
Key takeaways:
- A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for making service-to-service communication safe, fast and reliable.
- An API gateway is an API management tool that sits between a client and a collection of backend services acting as a reverse proxy to enable safe, fast and reliable access to your APIs and API products.
- A service mesh is essentially an observability and interoperability solution concerned with your services’ connectivity addressing the needs of SREs and DevOps engineers, while APIM is concerned with a much higher level than service mesh used to mature their API ecosystem from a consumption perspective.
- There’s room for both APIM and a service mesh depending on the size of the organisation and the resources at their disposal.
- Don’t get caught up in the hype, assess the scale of your problem, balance out the ideal stack against increased complexity, what may be right for Netflix or Google, may not be right for you!
Read more about Service mesh and API management here
