Enterprise API Ecosystem Strategy with API Gateways

What is an API Gateway?

An API gateway acts as reverse proxy, a tool situated in front of one or more APIs, which can serve as a single point of contact for external API consumers, as well as internal APIs and microservices. The gateway enforces security policies to protect against threats, and efficiently routes traffic between API producers and consumers.

When considering an enterprise API ecosystem strategy, API gateways play a central role in allowing organizations to manage the full lifecycle of APIs at scale. They provide the foundation for a robust, secure, and comprehensive approach to API management across distributed services.

An API gateway works by receiving API requests from a client, aggregating multiple requests, and routing them to the required services. When responses are received, the API gateway similarly aggregates them and routes them back to the user.

Read more about API gateways in a cloud native world

Why use an API Gateway?

Modern cloud native applications based on a microservices architecture frequently utilize API gateways. These applications usually consist of autonomous, independent, single-function components known as microservices. These components are loosely coupled and typically connected to their own databases. You can deploy, maintain and test each microservice independently.

Enterprise API Ecosystem Strategy Benefits

Adopting an enterprise API ecosystem strategy with a well-designed API gateway enables organizations to streamline security, governance, and observability for all their APIs. Enterprises benefit from a single, scalable solution for API governance—improving compliance, reducing risk, and promoting rapid innovation throughout the API ecosystem.

Handling requests

Microservices enable you to easily develop, deploy, and maintain different application functions, but they also make it difficult for external users to quickly and securely access the application. An API gateway helps solve this issue. Instead of asking customers to request access to each microservice separately, the gateway provides a single point of entry for all requests. 

Once a request for information comes into a microservices-based application, the API gateway retrieves and returns the data, streamlining this process. It sends them to the relevant service, collects results, and sends them back to the customer. The gateway handles access control and also allows reliable and fast delivery in large, complex applications.

Routing traffic

An API gateway provides a management interface for many important aspects of the application. It serves as the main proxy that connects customers to services, supporting security and administration functions such as metric collection, authentication, response transformation, and input validation.

Each microservice runs in an independent environment, allowing you to add, upgrade, move and change them without affecting the overall application. API gateways enable you to easily route traffic and scale up microservices applications, supporting agility as part of your wider enterprise API ecosystem strategy.

Learn more in our detailed guide to API gateways and microservices

How do API Gateways work?

Using an API gateway decouples the client interface from the backend implementation of a microservices architecture. API consumers only communicate with the API gateway, which provides an easier and more consistent experience than integrating with each backend API provider. 

When an API consumer sends a request to the API Gateway, the following process occurs:

• Request flow—the request is approved, validated, and translated against the backend endpoint. At this stage, API providers can request specific HTTP headers, query parameters and query strings, or API keys to identify the caller, block fraudulent requests, or impose limits or quotas.
• Routing requests—the API gateway is able to map between user requests and the backend services that can fulfill each request. Request routing to one or more relevant services. Multiple incoming requests for the same API are packaged into a single request to improve performance.
• —when APIs respond, the API gateway collects responses from multiple services and sends them back to the client. In the same way as requests, multiple responses may
  
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