Using API gateways and API management
We now focus on the core shield right technology for APIs, namely API gateways and API management (APIM) solutions. To understand what an API gateway does, let us consider how APIs were deployed before gateways existed. Typically, an API would be instantiated on a server, assigned a resolvable name, and connected to the public internet. While this achieved the result of bringing the API online, it created a myriad of other problems for system administrators:
- Difficulty in scaling the service, either horizontally or vertically
- A very tightly coupled architecture – the internal architecture of the system was exposed directly to the client and could not be refactored without potentially breaking all clients
- The lack of a common approach to cross-cutting concerns (issues common to all APIs best addressed in a standard method) meant that each API had to implement its own logging, access control, rate limiting, and load balancing...
