What is an API Gateway?

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The Portuguese translation of the word “Gateway” is Portão. The name is not a coincidence, since this API product operates in a similar way. This Application lithuania mobile database Interface serves to filter the types of requests that will happen with the API.

This technology has already been adopted by several companies around the world, and is made available by several companies, such as Mulesoft API . See some API Gateway functions :

Single point of access to all APIs , placing itself between your APIs and their respective users.
Data filtering at input , allowing you to redirect the API call to the correct location, based on the most different input parameters, and even ignore the request if desired, without sending traffic to your API. It is the sentinel of your gate.
Security mechanisms , which include user authentication and access logs.
User-based access limitation, which allows you to limit user access to a given resource based on a variety of premises, such as the number of requests in the month or in the last 10 seconds.
These API Gateway functions provide a wide range of advantages for companies that adopt them. A single access point, for example, means less effort in managing the “entry doors” of your web services, allowing you to focus your efforts in a single location.

Furthermore, the combination of the other gateway functions mentioned in the topics above allows all this processing to be performed outside of your API, reducing its complexity. This reduces the costs of keeping them online, opening doors for the development of even more APIs .

To further reduce the cost of exposing multiple APIs online, API Gateways commonly unify access to internal APIs, whether they come from legacy systems or more dynamic microservices. To implement microservices, we recommend using Docker, which you can learn more about in the article Why you need to adopt Docker right now.