API Gateway is a server that is a single entry point to your system. As you can imagine, primary function of this server is provide various API endpoints to various clients. It also hides the backend services from the client.
Why should I use API Gateway?
Consider a complex architecture where variety of clients are accessing your system. In this age, monolithic applications are getting outdated whereas microservices based applications are popular because of their efficiency and maintainability. As a result, all of the clients will need to make several calls to get data from various services from your system. So even to render one page, client will end up making several calls. This would be a problem on mobile network, which typically has latency issues. To add to this complexity, each client could have their own requirements. That could also mean client specific code.
All these problems can be solved by implementing an API Gateway. This server provides single point of reference for all the clients. It detects the client and breaks the request into multiple backend requests to fetch the data. This gives additional benefit of consolidating responses from all the backend requests into single response for the client.
Are there any drawbacks?
Yes, as is the case with almost everything in life! If due care is not taken, API Gateway itself can become bottleneck and heavy. All developers would be required to update API Gateway whenever they make changes to the endpoints or protocol to access their respective services. API Gateway gathers data from multiple webservices. As a result, failure of even one service could lead to unavailability of entire service. Or it could add delays in response to the client.
However, there are already ways to counter these drawbacks. Proper process such as DevOps could lead to removal of API Gateway becoming developer bottleneck. Usage of circuit-breaker libraries such as Netflix Hystrix could avoid overall service breakdown even in case of partial service outage.
Reference Links:
Example Implementations / Providers:
- AWS API Gateway
- Azure API Management
- Vertx
- JBoss Apiman
Related Keywords
Microservices Architecture, AWS, Azure, Hystrix
2 Replies to “API Gateway”