Using an API gateway could level up the security, performance and management of your APIs, letting you seamlessly integrate applications, streamline data exchange and deliver a smoother, more performant API experience. Let’s dive into what an API gateway is and how it can drive value for your business.
What is an API gateway?
An API gateway acts as the front door for all requests from clients (user applications, devices, etc.) to your backend services. It’s the single entry point, providing access control and routing requests to the appropriate service, allowing for effective API management, security and analytics.
While an API gateway microservices architecture is the most common example, it’s not the only way to use a gateway. You can also use an API gateway for Kubernetes, with Ingress or with a service mesh.
Why use an API gateway?
An API gateway makes it easier to secure and manage your APIs. It can handle:
- Authentication and authorization
- Protocol mediation and transformations
- Custom plugins and functions
- Analytics and tracing
- Versioning and API lifecycle management
- Caching
- Endpoint protection
- Logging
Benefits of an API gateway
API gateway integration can deliver many benefits, from faster API product creation to customer and revenue growth. You can use a gateway to lift and shift cloud migration, adopt microservices, scale rapidly, undertake complex API data/systems integration, or provide stress-free, efficient and secure API management.
Key benefits include:
- Simplifying the API management process. By controlling everything at the gateway layer, you can easily bring standardization to your API management.
- Improving security. Using an API gateway can work wonders for your API security. You can implement security policies at the gateway level, so every API benefits from standardized security, regardless of which team created it. Access control, key management, key hashing, allowlisting, certificate pinning, dynamic client registration… you can manage all of this and more through an API gateway, all while encrypting traffic to ensure secure communication and data exchange.
- Controlling access. You control who accesses your APIs, when and how. A secure API gateway can also handle authentication and authorization. This allows you to verify the identity of anyone making an API request and put permissions in place to enforce appropriate access control.
- Supporting robust API performance. Features such as rate limiting and load balancing can help protect you from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by ensuring the gateway isn’t overwhelmed by too many requests. This can also protect against cascading failures.
- Reducing latency. API gateway solutions have the potential to introduce latency, as your API calls are now going through the gateway layer. That said, the most performant API gateway will be able to handle tens of thousands of requests per second with minimal introduced latency. And, if latency is particularly relevant to you, there are steps that you can take to reduce it. API caching, for example, has the potential to reduce latency and is easy to manage through an API gateway platform.
- Scaling APIs. Implementing API gateway software creates the ideal environment for scaling your APIs and growing your business. It opens up the potential to manage each step of your API lifecycle, laying the groundwork for smooth scaling.
How does an API gateway work?
An API gateway works by accepting API requests from clients. The gateway processes those requests in accordance with policies that you can define. Based on those policies, the gateway will direct the requests to relevant services. It can combine responses and aggregate results before returning them to the client.
An API gateway can also translate between different API protocols. This means that you can work with SOAP, RESTful, GraphQL and other APIs while delivering a smooth user experience. You can tinker with the backend while presenting a single, unified entry point for clients.
In a microservices environment, by abstracting the backend service complexities, an API gateway provides a simplified interface to clients. It can aggregate results from multiple microservices into a single response, reducing the number of requests a client needs to make.
Key functions of an API gateway
Let’s look at some of the key features that underpin how an API gateway works:
- Request routing: An API gateway comes with a range of routing features. These include things like rate limiting, load balancing (such as native round-robin load balancing to rotate requests through target hosts), circuit breakers (these can be rate-based, to trigger events for corrective action or logging), the ability to manipulate requests and responses, custom error handling and more.
- Authentication and authorization: You can implement access control policies to secure your APIs. The range of available authentication and authorization mechanisms is impressive. Bearer tokens, HMAC signatures, JSON web tokens, multiple auth, OAuth 2.0, keyless authorization, OpenID Connect, Go plugin authentication, Python CoProcess and JSVM plugin authentication and physical keys are just some of your options!
- Traffic management: API gateways manage traffic with rate limiting, request throttling, request quotas, request size limits, key expiry, progressive delivery and more.
- Caching: An API gateway gives you the ability to cache requests in various ways. You could cache all safe requests, manually set which endpoint patterns to cache, or enable upstream control to allow another application to tell the gateway what to cache or not cache (and for how long).
- Transformation and data enrichment: You can use an API gateway to modify inbound and outbound body data and header information on the fly. With Tyk, for example, you can do this using scriptable or dedicated middleware. In this capacity, an API gateway can ensure traffic is in the required format, structure or style for your backend services and the client. It can also enrich data by modifying information or adding to it en route to its destination.
- Analytics: API gateways collect and analyze API usage and performance data, enabling you to make data-driven business decisions. They can also collect error data, including converting error messages from the backend into the format required by the client. The gateway can also deliver default responses or prompt alternative behavior during backend failures.
- Observability: An API gateway allows you to observe the health of your APIs. You gain valuable insights into your API usage patterns, performance metrics and error rates. This data is crucial for continuous improvement, helping you make informed decisions about scaling, security and new features. As the use of OpenTelemetry (OTel) grows, there’s also plenty of ways to use insights into your APIs to improve issue detection and troubleshooting. This supports your delivery of a consistent user experience on which your customers can rely.
Optimizing performance via an API gateway
API gateways can enhance the performance of your applications through capabilities like caching responses, compressing data and managing load balancing. This ensures that your services can handle high volumes of requests efficiently, including dealing smoothly with any spikes in traffic.
Optimizing performance is important for the quality of your user experience. Your users need to trust that your service will be reliable and fast – otherwise, they may be tempted to look at your competitors’ services instead.
How an API gateway enhances security in microservices architectures
One of the primary functions of an API gateway is to protect your microservices by providing layers of security such as authentication, authorization and threat protection. It ensures that only valid requests are processed by your services.
By using security policies, you can bring consistency to your APIs, baking security in at the gateway level to ensure a robust approach.
Types of API gateway
There are two main types of API gateways to choose from: cloud-based API gateways and on-premise API gateways. You can also opt for a hybrid solution, where your API gateway provider hosts the API management layer while your edge gateways are deployed on your infrastructure.
The setup you need will depend on a range of factors…
Cloud-based API gateway
If time is of the essence, a cloud-based API gateway can give you a head-start, as you don’t have to worry about infrastructure headaches. You can choose the regions where you want to locate your gateway(s), decide where your data will reside, and get started.
With a cloud-based API gateway, you can achieve everything you need quickly and easily. With Tyk Cloud, for example, you can:
- Implement your custom logic with Python-based plugins
- Configure customer domains for your dashboard and developer portal
- Create and manage multiple environments
- Create and manage control plane and edge gateway deployments
- Define teams, roles and users and easily manage access
On-premise API gateway
Also referred to by some API integration companies as a self-managed API gateway, an on-premise gateway is one that you install in your own infrastructure. This leaves you in complete control with no calling home and no usage limits (at least, not with Tyk API Gateway).
Control is a huge deal for many organisations. For example, if you operate in a heavily regulated environment, you may need a gateway to be part of your own infrastructure rather than cloud-based. This is where an on-premise solution shines, giving you the API gateway you need while leaving you in total control.
Wrap up
Implementing an API gateway delivers a wide range of benefits. Doing so:
- Simplifies communication pathways
- Enhances security through centralized enforcement
- Optimizes performance via caching, compression and load balancing
- Facilitates scaling of APIs and business growth
- Delivers insights and analytics that underpin sound business decision-making
By consolidating functionality like security, traffic control and analytics, an API gateway can create universal API management and provides a smooth developer experience.
API gateways also support flexibility in your approach to your infrastructure – provided you choose your gateway carefully. The right gateway will play nicely with service meshes, GraphQL, Kubernetes, compute services such as AWS Lambda, OpenTelemetry and so much more.
What next?
You can gain further benefits and flexibility by implementing full lifecycle API management. Why not get up to speed on that now, with our article on what API management is?
