Introducing Gateway patterns
When building a microservices-oriented system, the number of services grows with the number of features; the bigger the system, the more microservices you will have. When you think about a user interface that has to interact with such a system, this can become tedious, complex, and inefficient (dev-wise and speed-wise). Gateways can help us achieve the following:
- Hide complexity by routing requests to the appropriate services.
- Hide complexity by aggregating responses, translating one external request into many internal ones.
- Hide complexity by exposing only the subset of features that a client needs.
- Translate an external request into another protocol that's used internally.
A gateway can also centralize different processes, such as logging and caching requests, authenticating and authorizing users and clients, enforcing request rate limits, and other similar policies.
You can see gateways as façades, but instead...