API Gateway

API Design

Designing APIs: Less Data is More || Damir Svrtan

Features

Authentication
Authorization
Security
SSL termination
DDOS protection / Throttling
Adaptor (that will consolidate all information from all services and return as one response)
Serve static content
Cache responses
Request routing
Router & Load Balancer
A/B Testing
Canary Testing
Protocol Adapter
Monitoring all api's performance
Rate Limiting
Expose as API service

api-gateway

Using an API gateway has the following benefits

Insulates the clients from how the application is partitioned into microservices
Insulates the clients from the problem of determining the locations of service instances
Provides the optimal API for each client
Reduces the number of requests/roundtrips. For example, the API gateway enables clients to retrieve data from multiple services with a single round-trip. Fewer requests also means less overhead and improves the user experience. An API gateway is essential for mobile applications.
Simplifies the client by moving logic for calling multiple services from the client to API gateway
Translates from a "standard" public web-friendly API protocol to whatever protocols are used internally

The API gateway pattern has some drawbacks

Increased complexity - the API gateway is yet another moving part that must be developed, deployed and managed
Increased response time due to the additional network hop through the API gateway - however, for most applications the cost of an extra roundtrip is insignificant.

Tools

Cloud
- Apigee
- AWS API Gateway
- Azure API Gateway
- Google cloud endpoints
- WSO2 API Manager
Self Managed
- Apache
- HAProxy
- Nginx
- Spring cloud gateway
- https://apisix.apache.org

API Gateways

Gloo

The Hybrid Application Gateway built on top of Envoy Gloo is a feature-rich, Kubernetes-native ingress controller, and next-generation API gateway. Gloo is exceptional in its function-level routing; its support for legacy apps, microservices and serverless; its discovery capabilities; its numerous features; and its tight integration with leading open-source projects. Gloo is uniquely designed to support hybrid applications, in which multiple technologies, architectures, protocols, and clouds can coexist

https://github.com/solo-io/gloo

Ambassador

Ambassador is an open source Kubernetes-native API Gateway built on Envoy, designed for microservices. Ambassador essentially serves as an Envoy ingress controller, but with many more features. Key features include: