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API Gateway Service — Notes#

Concrete product view (Kong / Envoy / Tyk / NGINX Plus / Amazon API Gateway). For the foundational pattern see 00-fundamentals/api-gateway.

Functional#

  • HTTP / gRPC / WebSocket routing.
  • AuthN / AuthZ plugins, JWT verification.
  • Rate limiting, quotas, transforms.
  • API analytics, dashboards.
  • Developer portal + self-serve key issuance.

Non-functional#

  • p99 added latency < 5 ms.
  • 100k+ RPS per node.
  • Active-active HA cluster.

API#

  • Admin REST for routes / services / consumers / plugins.
  • Hot reload via xDS or polling.

Trade-offs#

  • Plugin-based extension vs scripted (Lua, WASM) — both common.
  • Stateless vs stateful plugins: state in Redis (rate limits) vs purely local.
  • Per-tenant isolation vs shared cluster: large customers expect dedicated.

Refs#

  • Kong, Tyk, Envoy + Istio docs.
  • AWS API Gateway, Google Apigee, Azure APIM.
  • Wallarm / Salt-style security overlays.