What is An API Gateway?

Published: October 11, 2024

What is an API Gateway and why do I need one?

As the enterprise landscape becomes increasingly complex, APIs are playing a progressively more crucial role in delivering services to customers. Unfortunately, malicious actors are also aware of the growing reliance on APIs, resulting in a significant surge in API-related security breaches in 2024. Well-known brands such as Dell, TMobile, Trello, and Twilio’s Authy have all experienced the repercussions of insecure APIs. Notably, 2024 alone witnessed an 80% increase in compromised records due to the use of an insecure API.

An API gateway is one answer to this concern – a potent tool that can enhance overall performance, streamline your API management and bolster security while aligning with key business values. In this blog post, we will explore why your enterprise requires an API gateway and how it can support your API strategy and bring exponentially compounding value to your business.

The Fundamentals of an API Gateway

At its core, an API gateway serves as a traffic controller for your APIs. It is a single entry point for all API requests, handling essential functions like request routing, protocol translation, and authentication. By centralizing these operations, API gateways simplify client implementations, reduce individual load across all APIs and decouple the complexity of backend services from client applications. It can perform all these operations in the context of the API request, understanding who the consumer is and the policies and permissions of the specific API or API operation, to make request and response-specific decisions.

Using the API gateway, we can enable logging and analytics at a central location which has access to all downstream requests and upstream responses. We don’t require access to individual APIs to generate useful metrics and visualizations about security and performance – both on a granular “per-API” level, as well as a holistic overview of all APIs.

API gateways typically come with, or allow for, the implementation of tooling for API management and control. This ‘control plane’ side of the gateway can become a center point for API governance activities such as onboarding and sharing, listing and discovering APIs, and finding documentation and asset information.

Implementing an API gateway as a centralizing point of architecture also enables your teams to become more agile in bringing new products or services to market. It reduces the need for teams to be aware of all existing APIs and their architectures, allowing for faster onboarding, rapid prototyping and iterations.

API Gateway for Security Enhancements

API gateways can greatly improve your API security posture by providing a robust suite of protective measures to safeguard backend services from various threats. By centralizing authentication and authorization processes, they ensure that only legitimate users gain access to the system while applying consistent security policies across all services. This is further bolstered by modern authentication methods like OAuth 2.0 and JWT, which offer secure and efficient access control.

API gateways perform request validation and input sanitization to prevent malicious data from reaching backend systems, thereby mitigating vulnerabilities to attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (while also reducing load on physical APIs that no longer have to manage bad requests).

Encryption is another critical feature provided by API gateways; it ensures that data in transit remains confidential and protected from eavesdropping or tampering through enforced HTTPS communication. Additionally, due to interfacing afforded by the API gateway, the API endpoints and their architecture are concealed from potential malicious actors.

Benefits & Capabilities:

• Centralized authentication and authorization
• Request validation and input sanitization
• Encryption & signing
• Rate limiting and throttling
• Abstraction of backend complexity
• Reduce security risk, build confidence and trust

Enabling Reporting, Compliance & Governance using your API Gateway

API gateways are perfect places to capture API events and traffic allowing for deeper analysis and correlation of data to understand subscriber behaviour and detect anomalies. They can be integrated with advanced analytics tools like Splunk or other SIEMs. This robust logging and analytics framework not only aids in operations and troubleshooting, but also helps to improve API performance and supports strategic decision-making by providing a holistic view of the API ecosystem’s health and usage trends. This centralized logging allows for the aggregation of data across various endpoints, facilitating the creation of rich dashboards that visualize real-time metrics such as response times, error rates, and traffic patterns. These insights enable proactive management and optimization of APIs by identifying bottlenecks and potential security threats before they escalate.

Enabling your API owners to benefit from fast API exposure through the gateway makes it a great functional point to enforce governance, and tooling can make this easy while enforcing security and reporting choices. The tools also become an asset catalogue of what is actually shared and exposed, how, and to which consumers.

Implementing the API gateway and focusing on compliance & governance will enable your business to:

• Enforce API design standards and best practices across the organization.
• Use an internal API catalogue to document all live APIs, promoting discoverability and reuse.
• Detect improperly decommissioned or “shadow” APIs to reduce API sprawl.
• Supports operational tasks, reducing the mean time to resolution of API integration issues with API consumers.
• Further security improvements are enabled as these logs can provide significant input into security monitoring and alerting for API consumption issues.
• Enables compliance and SLA/SLO reporting about APIs.
• Aids in strategic and business decision-making by providing a holistic view of API usage and performance.
• Supports discovery of API performance or behaviour problems, even when they’re an unusual or periodic occurrence.
• Enables visualization of API traffic for performance and management purposes.

Benefits & Capabilities:

• Detect security issues
• Reduce time to issue resolution
• Enforcing standards and best practices
• Enhancing API discoverability and reuse
• Compliance and performance reporting
• Plan for scalability and reliability
• Simplify management and reduce costs

Improving Mean Time to Innovation with your API Gateway

By centralizing control of APIs, API gateways streamline the management of policies that would otherwise be applied at an individual API level. Policies such as routing, security, and load balancing that would become increasingly complex are simplified which reduces the complexities for your team when maintaining and updating architecture. This frees up valuable cycles within your organization to focus more on innovation and the development of new business opportunities. API gateways also enable rapid prototyping and iteration by managing multiple versions of an API simultaneously. This capability allows developers to test new features and compare different versions without disrupting existing services.

API consumers (whether they be partners or other development teams) can leverage API Gateway catalogues to more quickly find which APIs exist in the organization and can be permissioned to access these APIs with a single credential quickly for fast onboarding. This reduces the time it takes to discover functionality, get access to it, and begin innovating new capabilities using existing data and functions in the organization, increasing the ROI on APIs by enabling quick reuse. Good catalogues contain documentation and operational information for the APIs the gateway protects, which can enable consumers to find information on an API and who to talk to to find out more.

Benefits & Capabilities:

• Simplify management
• Rapid prototyping and iteration
• Improved scalability
• API discovery and learning
• Respond to business opportunities and the market

Performance Improvement from an API Gateway

API gateways are instrumental in reducing performance overhead costs and enhancing the efficiency of your business operation. By efficiently managing load balancing and routing, it ensures that client requests are directed to the appropriate sites, thereby improving response times. Additionally, API gateways can limit the rate of requests on a client-by-client basis, preventing any single client from overwhelming the system. They also offer the capability to compress request and response payloads, which is beneficial as it functions independently of which internal API performs the request, leading to faster response times. By offloading common tasks such as authentication to a central location, API gateways allow backend services to concentrate on their core functionalities without duplicating efforts, thus simplifying management. By filtering out malformed or invalid requests at the gateway level, they maintain system integrity and reduce unnecessary processing in backend services. Overall, an API gateway acts as a strategic control point that not only boosts API performance but also reduces overall operational costs.

Benefits & Capabilities:

• Request aggregation
• Load balancing & routing
• Rate limiting
• Compression
• Rejecting malformed or invalid requests 

An API gateway is an indispensable component in modern API architectures, offering a multitude of benefits that streamline operations and drive innovation. At Solsys, we specialize in delivering cutting-edge API solutions that can transform your operations and secure your digital future. With years of experience in API consulting and implementation, Solsys has the expertise to guide you through the complexities of API governance & management. Please use the Contact Us link to reach out to talk to one of our experts!

Leor Roynsky is a Senior Technology Specialist at Solsys where he has been working with several large enterprise clients. With over five years of experience in Splunk and a Splunk Certified Core Consultant, Leor excels in deploying, managing, and troubleshooting complex Splunk Enterprise environments.