Como implementar gateways de API para microsserviços?

There are many reasons why we need an API gateway in the microservices architecture pattern: - To stop exposing internal concerns to external clients - To provide additional security to your microservices -To merge the communication protocols - To decrease the complexity of microservices, eventually improving the efficiency of the application. - To separate the microservice API and other external APIs to virtualize the design requirements and testing.

Before there was an API gateway, each microservice needed to handle many functions unrelated to business logic: rate limiting, authentication, observability, etc. With more and more microservices, a layer of abstraction is needed to liberate the productivity of engineers who write microservices. This layer of abstraction is the API gateway.

1. Design your API gateway: Determine the functionalities and features your API gateway should have. Consider factors such as authentication, authorization, rate limiting, caching, logging, and request/response transformations. Plan the structure and organization of your APIs. 2. Define your micro services: Identify the micro services that will be part of your system. Determine the APIs they expose and the endpoints they provide. Ensure each micro service has a clear purpose and well-defined boundaries.

Creating your API. This phase involves selecting the endpoints, response, and request formats that your public API will facilitate, including the overall structure and functionality. Incorporate with service discovery. The API gateway must be familiar with the corresponding microservices to route requests appropriately. Choose your service discovery mechanism, such as Eureka or Consul, to locate the microservice instances and configure your gateway accordingly. Prioritize security. Prioritizing security first is pivotal, as API gateways often offer a single-point entry. To strengthen security, you can employ best practices like strong encryption, appropriate access controls, and timely software updates.

API gateways offer several benefits for microservices-based applications. They can simplify the client-side logic by abstracting away the complexity of dealing with multiple services and endpoints. They can also implement common functionality that applies to all or some of the services, such as authentication, authorization, rate limiting, caching, logging, monitoring, and load balancing. Additionally, they can enable dynamic routing, service discovery, and versioning, which can facilitate the deployment and evolution of microservices.

Don't use the API gateway as an integration layer, to ensure maintainability and performance. Its role is to handle common concerns and reduce the load on internal services. However, complex logic and transformations are better handled elsewhere.

Kind of like what I said before, if you can, you will plan for everything. Agile teams an incredible construct for this type of planning because you know how overtime on your own you will lose the energy you had at the beginning of the task mentally to complete a very complex list of things that take so much concentration that you risk at some point not finishing one part of it or not planning for something.

In designing an API Gateway, key factors include managing REST-based public APIs for third-party partners/customers, ensuring data security and preventing overload or bad data entry. Essential considerations are API request management, rate limiting, authentication, authorization, load balancing, and security. For existing integrations, careful planning is needed when defining the gateway at a later stage to avoid disruption. Communication with clients is vital, with ample notice and support like webinars. I prefer off-the-shelf solutions like AWS API Gateway, complemented with custom code for specific APIs to provide detailed validations and enhanced functionality.

Design for Failure, Keep it stateless. Utilize managed services like AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, or Google Cloud Endpoints. These services offer robust features, scalability, and ease of management, which can save time and resources. Additional features like caching, logging, monitoring, and rate limiting further enhance the performance and reliability of your microservices architecture. They simplify client-side logic, enforce security policies, and ensure efficient communication between services.

For customers engaging with microservices, API Gateways act as one point of contact. They address load balancing, security enforcement, caching, request routing, and monitoring. Simplifying client interactions and improving general system performance, API gateways help to centralize these tasks. Extensive testing is absolutely necessary to guarantee best API gateway performance and capability. Functional testing to validate routing, error handling, and security methods; performance testing to evaluate response speeds and scalability; security testing to find vulnerabilities; and chaotic engineering to evaluate resilience all count here.

API gateway is a mission-critical infra component. When using cloud solutions or open source solutions, many factors need to be considered: - Vendor lock-in - Open source commercial company lock-in - Difficulty of custom development - Can it be deployed in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud

Based on your enterprise's unique needs, it's vital to assess the required functionalities for your API Gateway, including routing, authentication, data translation, and load balancing. In the design phase, focus on defining endpoints, integrating load balancing, and implementing security protocols. Key considerations for your decision should include support for different deployment topologies (cloud, on-premise, hybrid), the implications of custom development and its maintenance, and the level of ongoing support and updates offered. These factors are crucial to ensure your chosen API Gateway aligns seamlessly with your enterprise's infrastructure, security requirements, and future growth objectives.

Doing it on your own, again will always bring more challenges to implementing something as complicated as an API gateway/Authentication Server/Login Server depending on your decade. Out of the box is always better, also depending on your decade. Any why not go online for a premade solution and a free two hour video on how to implement any aspect of the technology?

10+ years ago my teams would build in-house, as third party solutions were heavy and/or too expensive. But over time they got simpler and more straightforward (and freemium) to the extent that I haven't recommended in-house development of an API gateway to any client for 8+ years

As a Product leader focused on APIs, the gateway decision is a difficult one, and one highly dependent on other infrastructure decisions made. I often come in with recommendations based on functionality of a gateway, but find the ideal gateway doesn't function ideally with other infrastructure decisions made. The winner is usually decided on their reliability when working with the rest of a business' infrastructure, even if ideal functionality has to be sacrificed.

To go off on a tangent here, you may wonder why there aren't more testing tools. This is because, you probably won't believe me I was around this issue listening, Postman and another application were initially illegal because of the powerful monitoring the tools provided. Like some other features of that were off limits to users it took some time for IT to grow and evolve to accept the tools and leverage the immense value these, what you would call, testing tools. We are way past the days of too little encryption, no VPN's and monitoring, so now there are many opportunities to grow in this area.

API Gateway testing is crucial to ensure the gateway operates reliably, securely, and efficiently. Key focus areas include routing for accurate request delivery to backend services, load balancing to distribute traffic evenly, and security to implement measures like DDoS protection and SQL injection prevention. Performance testing assesses the gateway’s ability to handle high traffic, while API management ensures proper rate limiting, quota management, and access control. Integration testing confirms seamless interaction with backend services, and testing for high availability and failover ensures the gateway can handle failures gracefully, maintaining minimal downtime and service continuity.

AWS CloudWatch was our go-to tool for monitoring and troubleshooting the API gateway, seamlessly integrating with Elastic Beanstalk, DocumentDB, and ELB to provide real-time insights. ✅ System Monitoring – CloudWatch dashboards tracked API requests, response times, and resource utilization across microservices. ✅ Error Detection – Configured alarms for HTTP errors, backend failures, and database issues to resolve bottlenecks quickly. ✅ Load Balancer Metrics – Monitored request count, latency, and traffic distribution for optimal performance. ✅ Log Analysis – Used CloudWatch Logs to centralize application logs, simplifying debugging and issue tracking.

Implementing API gateways for microservices involves setting up a centralized entry point that manages and routes requests to various microservices. Begin by configuring the API gateway to handle authentication, load balancing, and request routing to appropriate microservices based on the URL or request data. Incorporate features like caching, rate limiting, and logging to enhance performance and security. Ensure that the gateway can aggregate responses from multiple services and provide a unified response to the client. Finally, continuously monitor and adjust the gateway configuration to adapt to evolving service requirements and traffic patterns.