Welcome to ‘Introduction to API Gateway’.

After watching this video, you will be able to

explain an API Gateway,
explain the benefits of using an API Gateway,
explain the drawbacks of using an API Gateway,
and describe the available API Gateway products.
An API Gateway is an API management tool that sits between a client
and a collection of backend services.
It aggregates the various services required to fulfill them and returns the
appropriate result.
Why do you use an API Gateway?
An API Gateway can help you to protect your APIs from malicious usage or overuse.
Thus, you can use an authentication service with rate limiting.
It also helps to understand how your APIs are used,
using an analytics and monitoring service.
In addition, you can monetize your APIs using a billing system.
A gateway also presents a single point of contact to your various
microservices and provides a single response to a request.
Finally, you can seamlessly add or remove APIs
without the client’s knowledge about the services running at the back end.
Since your online store
follows microservices architecture; some of those services will be:
a product information service that shares basic information
about the product such as id, name, and price,
an inventory service that reveals what’s available in stock,
an order service that enables customers to place an order for a product,
and an authentication service to validate users on the platform.
So, how does a client access the microservices?
This is a problem when you need to interact with multiple APIs.
An API Gateway can remove this complication and allow you to:
change hosts and their locations,
increase or decrease the number of service instances,
and replace your existing service, for example, an ordering service, with a new
one.
The client’s access to the services remains undisturbed.
The benefits of using an API Gateway are as follows:
It insulates the clients from how the application is partitioned into
microservices.
In other words, it simplifies the client side by moving the
logic for calling multiple services from the client to the API Gateway.
It also provides the optimal API for each client, regardless of who the client is.
It reduces the number of requests or round trips.
For example, the API Gateway enables clients to retrieve
data from multiple services with a single round trip.
And irrespective of how your microservices communicate internally, an API Gateway
will provide a standard protocol to communicate with the outside world.
Although an API Gateway provides many benefits, it also has some drawbacks.
It’s another component that needs to be developed and maintained.
In addition, if not designed carefully,
it can become a single point of failure in an application.
Also, a Gateway will increase the response time due to this
additional network step in the execution of the application.
There are plenty of API Gateway products available on the market.
You can choose from managed or open-source options.
From IBM, an industry-leading, high-security application
gateway called IBM DataPower Gateway.
Google has two offerings based on your needs: Apigee or Cloud Endpoints.
Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS also offer gateways on their platforms.
While those are managed products, in the open source world, some famous names are:
Kong, being top of the list in popularity,
Apache APISIX,
Tyk, which also has a managed version,
and finally, Gloo, which is also available as an enterprise version.
In this video, you learned that:
an API Gateway is the door to your backend services,
it enables you to plug additional services
while providing your client with unified access to your services,
it hides the complexity of your backend services from the client,
it makes it easier to scale or replace your backend services,
and there are many managed and open source API Gateway products available to choose
from.