APIgatewaysi

APIgatewaysi is a term used to describe a class of software components that sit at the edge of an API ecosystem to manage, route, and secure API traffic. Acting as a reverse proxy, it receives client requests, determines the target service, and enforces organizational policies before forwarding traffic to backend services.

Core functions include request routing and load balancing, support for multiple protocols (HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, gRPC, GraphQL), and dynamic path-based or header-based routing. It provides authentication and authorization, rate limiting and quotas, caching, and request/response transformation such as header injection or data masking. It often integrates with service discovery and can enable canary or blue-green deployments through traffic shifting. Telemetry features collect metrics, traces, and logs for observability.

Deployment patterns include edge gateways deployed near clients to protect and accelerate exposure of APIs, and internal gateways used within a microservices cluster to consolidate ingress and policy enforcement. Many implementations support integration with service meshes for fine-grained control, security, and observability.

Security and governance aspects include TLS termination or end-to-end TLS, mutual TLS for service-to-service authentication, IP filtering, bot protection, and API key or OAuth token validation. Policies can enforce rate limits, quotas, and access controls, and governance features track API usage and enforce compliance.

Interoperability and standards considerations reflect the need to handle diverse APIs, with common support for OpenAPI specifications, JWT, OAuth 2.0, and mTLS, as well as transformations between protocol flavors. While gateways focus on traffic control, API management often includes developer portals, analytics, and monetization features, providing a broader suite for API governance. APIgatewaysi is a general concept rather than a single product, and implementations vary in scope and capabilities.