The API gateway has continued to grow in importance in the tech industry because of the proliferation of APIs for integrating systems. The API gateway assists in securing and managing APIs in use by providing features for authorization and authentication.
API management helps with the full lifecycle management of your APIs, and sometimes even includes helping you monetize your APIs. There is a lot overlap between API gateways and API management platforms, so it might be worth checking out our materials on API management too.
Choosing the right API gateway vendor can save your engineering team considerable time and keep your systems secure.
Many of these vendors will do an excellent job, but at times there can be hidden “gotchas” that only show themselves at scale. In our comparisons listed below, we cover the pros, the cons and the gotchas that could impact your decision on the right API gateway provider for you.
Our most popular comparison pages are:
Which are the API gateway vendors usually worth including in your vendor evaluations? We've compiled the list below
Amazon API Gateway is a service offered by AWS that is very popular for securing APIs in the AWS ecosystem, and can get quite costly, especially in serverless architectures.
Every world-class cooperation understands that an API gateway provides more than one point of entry for all its apps. Uber’s Edge Gateway API is a perfect example of the API's unbound limits and scalability.
Uber began its operations with an infrastructure divided into two components. The two components were the dispatch and API, each with a different function.
However, Uber has adopted several other generations of API gateways. The latest of these generations is the Edge Gateway API.
Uber’s latest Edge Gateway API is a simple Golang service built with a UI top. This provides developers with one destination to build, configure and edit APIs. Uber Engineering published an article on May 19, 2021, describing its API gateway's architecture in depth.
This is a plus for tech enthusiasts and developers around the globe. The blog article and a study of Uber’s API evolution will act as a cheat sheet for making API extensive and robust in the most demanding ecosystems.
This revelation will also shed light on the microservice dilemma most companies encounter.
Even with new challenges cropping up from time to time, SoundCloud's service architecture has significantly evolved. SoundCloud instigated the Backends For Frontends(BFF) architectural design in 2013. The aim was to do away with the old eat-your-own-dog food approach. The old model used one Public API for third-party integrations and official applications.
But, as the old proverb says, necessity is the mother of invention. The need for organizational expansion has led to migration from the old system to a microservices architecture.
By enabling the creation of multiple API gateways for different devices, the BFF architectural pattern has optimized each API for its use case. While BFFs have the potential to give users a higher degree of development and autonomy, you must manage them well for smooth functioning.
In an article published on November 04, 2019, Microsoft announced the availability of a new set of Azure Arc-enabled services in preview. The Azure Arc-enabled services provide customers with a flexible self-hosted gateway that manages APIs securely and sufficiently.
The self-hosted gateway is simple, easy to use, and also deployable to Kubernetes or Docker on a desktop.
The good news is that it provides its users with a unified management experience across private and external APIs. Consequently, this allows for the optimization of traffic and security compliance needs.