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An API gateway gives client applications a common entry point to backend services. It can route requests and apply selected edge controls—such as authentication, TLS handling, request validation, and rate limits—but it is not mandatory for every microservices system. In production, treat it as critical infrastructure: keep its role focused, monitor its health, and plan for its failure and scaling.
What does an API gateway do in microservices?
A gateway sits between API consumers and backend services. Instead of requiring clients to know the location and topology of many services, clients call an API-facing interface; the gateway routes each request to an appropriate backend and can enforce selected policies at that boundary.
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Depending on the implementation, those policies may include TLS termination, authentication, request validation, authorization checks, request limits, and access logging. These are capabilities, not automatic guarantees: the gateway must be configured to enforce them, and behavior differs by product.
Typical request flow
- A client sends a request to the gateway endpoint.
- The gateway applies configured edge controls, such as validating the request or checking an identity credential.
- It routes an accepted request to a backend service.
- The service performs its domain operation and returns a response, which the gateway passes back to the client.
Keep the gateway focused on edge concerns. It should not become a place for unrelated business rules. A gateway may check identity or apply coarse access policy, but a service should retain authorization decisions that depend on domain context—for example, whether a particular user is permitted to change a particular account.
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Do I need an API gateway?
Use one when a shared API boundary solves a real problem: clients need a stable endpoint despite service changes, several APIs need consistent edge policies, or you need a place to control routing and traffic before requests reach services. It can reduce how much backend topology clients must understand.
A gateway also adds a network hop and an operational dependency. For a small system with few services, limited external traffic, or no need for centralized edge controls, direct service exposure or another simpler routing arrangement may be sufficient. The decision depends on your client needs, security boundaries, traffic patterns, and ability to operate the gateway reliably—not on microservices alone.
Is Kubernetes Gateway API the same as an API gateway?
No. An API gateway is an architectural pattern or product role; Kubernetes Gateway API is a Kubernetes service-networking configuration interface. The Kubernetes project describes it as “an add-on containing API kinds that provide dynamic infrastructure provisioning and advanced traffic routing.” The interface does not itself guarantee that every implementation provides the same gateway features.
How the Kubernetes resources fit together
- GatewayClass: identifies the controller that implements a class of gateways.
- Gateway: describes traffic-handling infrastructure.
- HTTPRoute: describes how HTTP traffic is matched and directed to backends.
Route attachment across namespaces is governed by the Gateway’s allowedRoutes configuration. Check the chosen controller’s documentation for the features and behaviors it actually supports; a resource being part of the API does not mean every controller implements every capability identically. See the Kubernetes Gateway API documentation.
Which security controls belong at the gateway?
A gateway can provide a useful enforcement point for encrypted transport, request validation, identity integration, access policies, and logging. For example, Amazon API Gateway documents transport encryption, validation against API models, request transformation, CORS configuration, WAF integration, metrics, access logs, and management-action auditing. Those features can support a security design, but they do not replace one.
- Define which clients and networks can reach each backend, rather than assuming that routing alone makes a service private.
- Use TLS deliberately and determine whether your service-to-service paths also require encryption or mutual TLS.
- Keep domain-sensitive authorization in the service that owns the relevant data and rules.
- Validate inputs at the appropriate boundary and in the service; edge validation is not a substitute for safe backend handling.
- Limit sensitive information in access and diagnostic logs, and audit configuration changes.
Security capabilities and configuration details vary by implementation. Review the official Amazon API Gateway security documentation alongside the documentation for the gateway you deploy.
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How should a gateway handle rate limits and overload?
Rate limits can protect upstream services and support quotas for consumers. Their usefulness depends on the scope and policy: limits may apply to a consumer, route, service, stage, or account, and different implementations offer different algorithms and guarantees. Kong documents rate-limiting policies scoped to services, routes, and consumers, with capabilities varying between its standard and advanced plugins.
Do not treat a configured limit as a universal hard ceiling. AWS documents token-bucket throttling and account-, route-, and stage-level targets for HTTP APIs, but describes these as best-effort targets; excess traffic may receive HTTP 429. That behavior is specific to the service and configuration, not a rule for every gateway. Consult the AWS HTTP API throttling documentation and the documentation for your implementation.
Design clients for throttling
- Handle HTTP 429 as a signal to slow down, not as an invitation to retry immediately.
- Use bounded retries with backoff and rate limits, and respect any retry guidance the server provides.
- Avoid synchronized retries from many clients; retry storms can worsen an overloaded backend.
- Decide which operations are safe to retry, especially when a request may have completed before the client received an error.
Test overload behavior across the gateway and its upstream services. A gateway limit can reduce pressure, but it cannot make an overloaded dependency healthy.
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How do you keep the gateway available and observable?
A centralized entry point can also become a shared failure point. Operate it like production infrastructure: plan capacity, make deployment and configuration changes safely, and monitor both the service as a whole and its individual instances or data-plane nodes.
Monitor user impact and component health
- Track request volume, end-to-end latency, upstream or integration latency, error classes, and saturation.
- Alert on signals that indicate user impact, not only on whether a process is running.
- Monitor each node or equivalent provider-managed component; one healthy instance does not prove the whole deployment is healthy.
- Test health checks, configuration rollouts, and recovery procedures.
Kong recommends readiness and liveness probes for Kubernetes deployments and monitoring all data-plane nodes; a process-only check does not prove that configuration is valid. AWS documents API Gateway metrics and logs through CloudWatch. See the Kong monitoring guidance and AWS security and monitoring documentation.
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Managed, self-hosted, or hybrid: how should you choose?
There is no universal winner. Compare the operational model and the requirements of your API rather than treating products as directly interchangeable.
| Decision area | What to establish |
|---|---|
| Operational ownership | Who deploys, upgrades, configures, and responds to incidents? A managed service shifts some infrastructure operations to the provider; self-hosted operation leaves more of that work with your team. |
| Environment and portability | Check how tightly the choice depends on a cloud provider, Kubernetes, or a particular deployment topology. For Kubernetes controllers, verify the features actually implemented. |
| API requirements | Confirm required protocols, routing behavior, API lifecycle and management features, developer access, WebSocket or gRPC support, and policy extensions. |
| Security and governance | Evaluate identity integration, TLS or mutual TLS, network reachability, WAF needs, validation, logs, audit, and who owns policy configuration. |
| Traffic and reliability | Check limit scope and algorithm, burst behavior, retry expectations, health checks, scaling model, and failure boundaries. |
| Operations and cost | Account for staffing, upgrades, monitoring integration, expected request and data-transfer volume, and current pricing for the intended region and configuration. |
Examples of different product shapes
AWS positions HTTP APIs as a proxy-oriented option and REST APIs for cases that need API proxying together with API-management features; it also offers WebSocket APIs. Kong documents traditional, hybrid, and DB-less deployment modes. These descriptions illustrate different product shapes, not an apples-to-apples performance comparison. Check current feature availability, quotas, versions, and pricing for your intended region and configuration in the AWS API Gateway documentation and Kong Gateway documentation.
Quick Recap
Production decision checklist
- Identify the client problem or operational control the gateway will solve.
- Keep edge policies at the gateway and domain behavior in the services that own it.
- Confirm protocol, routing, security, and API-management requirements against the chosen implementation.
- Specify overload behavior, client retry policy, health checks, alerts, and recovery ownership.
- Decide who owns upgrades and configuration, and how changes are tested and rolled back.
- Validate implementation-specific feature support, quotas, and pricing before committing.
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