API Gateway Fundamentals

Define what an API is as a set of methods for two software components to communicate, and see how an endpoint exposes an API for data retrieval.

Explore the importance of API for backend software to support mobile and web frontends. Learn how exposing an API extends your app's reach and enables monetization.

Explore the challenges of using APIs, from ensuring secure communication between systems to avoiding risks that can make your system slow or hard to maintain.

Monitor diverse, independently managed APIs by streaming their data to a central console, across varied tech stacks and teams, to avoid relying on developers' memory and ensure reliability.

Secure access by authenticating authorized users to APIs and preventing data leaks and attacks. Centralize tool choices, MFA, and token validity to enforce consistent authentication beyond individual API developers.

Explore how an API gateway acts as a centralized single point of contact between clients and APIs, routing requests and enforcing authentication by forwarding unauthenticated users to the authentication server.

Compare cloud and on-prem api gateway pricing across per-request, monthly, and tiered models, with free open-source options and paid support, including AWS, Azure, WSO2, and Apache gateways.

Explore how API gateways act as the entry point between clients and APIs, and learn key routing, authentication, caching, monitoring, throttling, versioning, validation, transformation, and central governance capabilities.

Explore how routing directs client requests to the right API by analyzing the URL, mapping endpoints like client retrieval to customers get.

Api gateway authentication validates tokens via identity services such as OpenID, SAML, Active Directory, or Okta, routing only authenticated requests to backend APIs.

Leverage caching in an API gateway to boost performance by serving data from the in-memory cache when recent requests exist, avoiding calls to back-end APIs.

Monitor and analyze API performance by routing calls through the API gateway, logging latency and errors to a central logging and monitoring mechanism, enabling standard logging across APIs.

Throttle traffic with an API gateway to prevent backend overload by blocking excess requests and ensuring backend APIs receive only what they can handle.

The api gateway routes requests to the correct api version by mapping the url to v1 or v2, and defaults to the latest version when none is specified.

Api gateway inspects and validates requests, checking the url, body, and header, and provides a central, standard validation mechanism with error codes before any backend call.

Explore how API gateway transformation modifies requests to be compatible with backend APIs, turning legacy SOAP XML into a modern REST interface and enriching requests with user data.

Discover how API Gateway applies to different application types, compare its added value across apps, and set clear expectations for what API Gateway can help with.

Explore the monolith architecture, a single-process codebase with shared resources and legacy constraints. Learn how an API gateway enhances authentication, monitoring, and policy enforcement in monoliths.

Explain API Gateway in the enterprise and the key considerations before deployment, reviewing deployment options and decisions that should not be skipped.

Explore centralized versus decentralized API gateway architectures, weighing security centralization, cost, and expertise against team autonomy and fault tolerance, then start with one gateway and scale as needed.

Understand the god gateway pattern, an anti-pattern where a single API gateway handles too much, causing performance and maintenance issues. Use gateways primarily for routing, logging, monitoring, and authentication.

Explore Azure API management as a feature-rich API gateway, examine pricing tiers, built-in policies, and the developer portal for organizational API programs.

Explore GCP Apigee, a premium api management platform for full lifecycle management with design, monitoring, and depreciation. Learn about hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, multi-region redundancy, and the built-in developer portal.

Learn how API gateways enforce organization-wide governance and policies by inspecting traffic and applying security and monitoring measures. Plan these policies before deployment to guide backend behavior.

Enforce network access control in your API gateway by allowing or denying requests based on location, IP ranges, or client type, ensuring only authorized resources reach the backend.

Inspect incoming traffic at the gateway to filter unauthorized requests, verify headers, data elements, TLS version, and body; route valid requests to the API, unlike origin-based network access control.

Log and monitor every request through the api gateway to enable transparency and analytics on usage and performance. Ensure the gateway can send log records to a central monitoring mechanism.

Rate limit blocks requests from heavy sources at the API gateway to protect the backend from excessive traffic. Ensure your gateway supports this policy, as not all gateways offer it.

Outline the implementation strategy for the API gateway with a well-planned process, and learn the ordered steps required to avoid unusable, poorly maintained gateways.

Identify a dedicated stakeholder team to own the API gateway’s setup, maintenance, and configuration. Avoid leaving this to developers, and ensure cloud experience, IT knowledge, and explicit consent.

Select the API gateway with stakeholder involvement by applying the discussed criteria and using the table of the three cloud-based leading gateways to guide your organization's choice.

Select training for identified stakeholders and prioritize training methods. Prioritize live training by a vendor certified trainer, then third-party trainers, then on-demand digital courses, then tools documentation.

Define governance for the api gateway by establishing policies with input from the ciso and it, test them with a dummy backend, and prepare a form specifying routes and authentication.

Pilot a small app behind the API gateway to test diverse backends, secure cooperative devs and incentives, then add APIs to show a deployed gateway with an ambassador team.

Coordinate organization-wide communication to promote the API gateway, showcase its value, and enlist ambassador pilot teams through a staged meeting, demonstrations, and on-demand training.