In our previous recipe, we explored a basic microservice to look up DNS records. While this can be limited per service to prevent abuse, ideally, we want to configure a centralized point to manage this. Otherwise, any limits across multiple services will not be considered as a whole and will need to be individually implemented per service. The following figure explains the differences:
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To build a centralized API gateway, we need to consider the following points:
- Authentication
- Request routing
- Rate limiting
- Load balancing
- Security
- Logging
This recipe will cover a basic implementation of an API gateway to get you started with some of the core concepts. Because of the ease of implementation, it provides a rapid way to get started with the management of a few, small microservices.