Implementing the API gateway pattern

Certain guidelines should be followed when implementing an API gateway. Given its description, we might be inclined to develop a new microservice, label it the gateway, and develop and maintain the API integrations ourselves.

Surely, this is a viable approach, and it does give you full control over the implementation, rules, and features that you deem necessary for your application and downstream services. We can also implement specific business logic to govern certain operations by orchestrating requests and responses to the downstream services and aggregating and transforming data accordingly. However, this can lead to having a thick API gateway. We will discuss this further in the next section.

Thick API gateways

The expression thick API gateway is coined when we realize we are placing too much business operation logic into our API gateway. Our gateway should act more as an abstraction layer between the client and the microservices,...