Networking & Delivery
API Gateway
A front door for your APIs that handles routing, authentication, rate limiting, and traffic shaping in one place.
An API gateway is the single entry point that sits in front of your backend services and handles the cross-cutting concerns every API needs: routing requests to the right service, checking authentication, enforcing rate limits, and shaping traffic. Instead of each service reimplementing all of that, the gateway does it once at the edge.
It earns its place most in microservice and serverless setups, where dozens of small services would otherwise each need their own auth and throttling. The gateway also gives you one place to version APIs, log requests, and cut off abusive clients. Cloud platforms bundle managed gateways, and tools like Kong and the gateway layers in Cloudflare and the hyperscalers fill the role.
For a single monolithic app, a gateway can be overkill, since the app itself already owns those concerns. It becomes worthwhile as the number of independently deployed services grows and you want consistent policy across all of them.