Benefits of an API gateway

Use of API gateways provides the following benefits:

• Separation of concerns: Insulates the microservice providers from the service consumers on the application side. This allows the separation of the application tier from the service requesting clients.
• Consumer oriented: API gateways provide a unified hub for a large number of APIs and microservices. This allows the consumer to focus on API utility instead of locating where a service is hosted, managing service request limits, security, and so on.
• API oriented: Provides an optimum API based on the type of the client and required protocols.
• Orchestration: Provides the ability to orchestrate multiple services calls into one API call, which in turn simplifies the logic for a client. Now, instead of calling multiple services, it can invoke one API. Fewer requests means less invocation overhead and improve the consumer experience overall. An API gateway is essential for mobile applications.
• Monitor: An API gateway also provides the ability to monitor API invocations, which in turn allows enterprises to evaluate the success of APIs and their usage.

Besides the overall benefits, API gateways add more pieces to the overall puzzle. Meaning more infrastructure to manage, more configurations to manage, more points of failure, and additional hops to the requests. So, unless the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, use of API gateways needs be carefully scrutinized for the business requirements and benefits.

Next, we will see the process of breaking down the application functionalities as a set of APIs or microservices.