The Anatomy of aModern API Gateway
Not all API gateways are created equal. Explore the industry’s most trusted, cloud native, and GitOps-driven API gateway.
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What is an API Gateway?
An API gateway is a critical component of modern microservices architectures that help to secure, route, and observe tremendous volumes of requests from both people and other applications.
API gateways centralize security and routing, allowing you to better handle cross-cutting concerns such as access control, rate limiting, and analytics. Additionally, API gateways make it easier to enforce security policies, optimize performance across multiple services, and scale your operations.
Changing API Gateway Requirements
Because the concept of API gateways emerged well over a decade ago, many solutions lack the ability to keep pace with modern environments and operating models, sometimes including hundreds of servers, services, and deployments per day.
In order to support modern environments, API gateways must be cloud native, fully declarative, and aligned to GitOps principles. Additionally, API gateways need to be able to manage requests to and from applications in public and private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, multi-orchestrator, and on-prem applications.
Limitations of Existing API Gateways
Because many API Gateways were created before the cloud native and GitOps era, the following limitations are common:
Inefficient Operations
Reliance on UI-centric and proprietary operations limit the benefits of modern declarative configurations, requiring additional tools, scripts, and hacks, even for entry-level GitOps processes.
Limited Deployment Options
Legacy solutions were not designed to support cloud native stacks, don’t provide integrations with modern orchestrators, and may only operate in specific environments.
Disruptive Changes
Service discovery and configuration are manual and require full system reloads, resulting in the loss of existing open connections, reducing uptime, and impacting SLAs.
Understand What to Expect from Modern API Gateways and How to Evaluate Them
Download the Guide NowIt’s Time to Expect More from Your API Gateway
While most API gateways have the basic access control and routing capabilities businesses need, they lack the operational finesse and efficiency DevOps and Platform engineers expect, including:
Fully Declarative and Highly Automated
Modern API gateways are fully declarative end-to-end. This ensures teams can benefit from CI/CD strategies (i.e., GitOps), enabling them to control and even automate routing, load balancing, security policies, and other configurations (including any custom objects) via a fully declarative approach.
Flexibility and Adaptability
As truly cloud native solutions, modern API gateways enable teams to discover, secure, and deploy APIs and microservices across any deployment model (hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, or multi-orchestrator), any Kuberentes distribution, any non-Kubernetes orchestrator, and on-prem or legacy environments.
Dynamic Change Management
Modern API gateways don’t require a full reload to configure new services, change routing, harden security policies, or update certificates. These actions can, in fact, be automatic and instantaneous, maintaining HA and SLAs. Additionally, they can provide intelligent routing based not only on host and URI path, but also HTTP method, header values, JWT claims, and other values for maximum flexibility.
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