Simplified API Management: An API gateway centralizes the management of APIs, making it easier to handle routing, request processing, and protocol translation. This simplifies the development and deployment process by providing a single entry point for all API requests[2][7].
Enhanced Security: API gateways add an additional layer of security by handling authentication, authorization, and protection against attacks such as SQL injection, XML parser exploits, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. This reduces the attack surface by hiding internal microservices from external clients[1][3][5].
Improved Performance: By caching responses, rate limiting requests, and optimizing communication between clients and backend services, API gateways can significantly improve performance and reduce latency for end users[7].
Protocol and Data Format Transformation: API gateways can convert requests and responses between different protocols (e.g., HTTP to gRPC) or data formats (e.g., JSON to XML), enabling greater flexibility in how clients and services communicate[7][10].
Load Balancing and Fault Tolerance: API gateways can distribute incoming traffic evenly among multiple instances of a backend service, improving performance and fault tolerance. This helps ensure that the system remains responsive and available even if individual services or instances experience failures or become overloaded[7][10].
API Analytics and Monitoring: API gateways provide valuable insights into API usage by monitoring and logging API requests. This helps in identifying trends, diagnosing problems, and improving the overall reliability and resilience of the system[2][5][7].
Decreased Microservice Complexity: By handling common concerns such as authorization, access control, and rate limiting at the gateway level, API gateways allow microservices to focus on their core business logic, reducing development time and complexity[1][3].
Drawbacks of an API Gateway
Single Point of Failure: An API gateway can become a single point of failure for the entire system. If the gateway goes down, it can make the whole system unavailable, even if the individual microservices are still operational[4][6][9].
Increased Latency: Introducing an API gateway adds an additional network hop, which can increase response times. This added latency might be insignificant for some applications but can be critical for othe...
