Summary

This chapter has reviewed the need for an API gateway. When building a monolith, we have a single point of entry to our application’s supporting API and this single point of entry can be used for any type of client.

The downside to this is that we might end up with an API that becomes increasingly difficult to improve on and scale as the demands change. We also need to consider the fact that different devices have different needs from the API in terms of caching, compression, and authentication to name a few.

We then attempt to diversify our application’s capabilities into multiple services or microservices and then implement only what is needed per service. This approach simplifies each service’s code base while complicating the code base of the client applications. Where there was one service endpoint, we now have several to keep track of.

API gateways will sit on top of all the microservices and expose a single point of entry and allow us to...