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An API gateway is a centralized runtime component that accepts client requests, authenticates, authorizes, routes and optionally transforms them. It abstracts backend services, consolidates interfaces, and provides rate limiting, monitoring and protocol translation. Gateways are key in distributed architectures and influence performance, resilience and opera…
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An API gateway is a central mediation layer in front of backend services. It consolidates requests and handles cross-cutting concerns such as security, routing, transformation, and traffic control.
API gateways emerged in distributed systems with many backend services and growing API management needs. Instead of repeating authentication, authorization, protocol translation, monitoring, or caching in every service, those responsibilities are placed at a front-end entry point. This standardizes external access while keeping internal services decoupled.
Think of the gateway as a guarded front desk with a dispatch desk behind it. A client talks to one endpoint. The gateway checks rules and permissions, rate-limits if needed, selects the target service, can adapt data or protocols, may serve cached responses, and logs each pass. The cross-cutting work is handled before requests reach the services themselves.
The gateway sits at the integration boundary between clients and distributed services.
Contracts, routes, and data shapes provide the basis for routing and transformation.
Authentication, authorization, and protection rules are enforced centrally.
Requests are constrained to reduce abuse and overload.
Reusable responses or partial results reduce latency and backend load.
Incoming traffic can be distributed across multiple instances or targets.
An API gateway is especially useful in microservices, with multiple client types, or when security, observability, and traffic rules should live in one place before the services. It simplifies the external interface, but it adds an extra hop, configuration effort, and a central operational component. For small systems, a more direct design is often easier.
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