popular api gateway for microservices

There is no need to tear down the east wall to make up for the west wall. Your microservices need a smart "traffic director"

Imagine this: your city has no traffic lights and no road signs. There are a few traffic police standing at each intersection, but they do their own thing - three cars are allowed here, but five cars are blocked there. It was chaos during the morning and evening rush hours. Is your microservice architecture also experiencing this kind of "traffic paralysis"? There are more and more services, and the calling relationships are like a mess. Authentication, monitoring, current limiting... Each service has to deal with a bunch of chores on its own. The result? The development speed is as slow as crawling, and no one can find out if there is a problem.

This is why, that thing called "API gateway" is no longer an optional option, but has become a "necessity" in the microservice world. It is not some profound magic. To put it simply, it is the only door and intelligent dispatch center for all your services to the outside world.

But the problem is, there are so many “gates” on the market, how do you choose?

Don't rush to read the technical comparison document. Let’s first talk about what a good “door” should do. It must be a super operator, organizing the complex internal service network into a clear and unified interface to the front end or partners. For example, when a user logs in once, the gateway has to be responsible for reliably passing the identity information to the next dozen services that need it, instead of asking each service to re-verify the identity.

It has to be a competent security guard. Malicious access, sudden traffic peak? The gateway should be on the front line, blocking abnormal requests and protecting vulnerable service instances at the back. This is like community access control, which prevents strangers from knocking on your door directly.

Furthermore, it is an objective observer. It silently records all incoming and outgoing requests, response times, and success rates. Which service is "cold" today and the response is slow? It can detect it immediately, so that you don't have to wait until users complain to discover the problem.

It sounds ideal, but many teams roll up their sleeves to develop one, or just choose an open source solution and apply it. As a result, they often fall into new pits: the performance bottleneck becomes a single point of failure, the configuration is so complicated that it requires dedicated maintenance, and the entire system has to shake three times to update the policy.

Therefore, the key to model selection is not how many cool feature lists it has, but whether it is truly "sensible" and "built to last."

What does a "sensible" gateway look like?

It should be almost invisible to you, yet provide protection everywhere you go. Deploy it quickly and don't let it become the most difficult part of the system. Management should be intuitive. It is best to be able to handle routing and circuit breaker strategies with just a click of the mouse or write a few simple configuration sentences, rather than having the team study obscure configuration files all day long.

The scalability is better. Today you only have ten services, tomorrow you might have a hundred. It is very important whether the gateway can expand horizontally gracefully and easily cope with traffic growth, instead of just showing off at every turn.

Also stability and observability. It is as solid as a rock, and at the same time it can clearly display the operating status of your system, giving you peace of mind.

When we talk about this, we have to mentionkpowerWhen polishing their API gateway products, they spent a lot of effort to deal with these real pain points. They did not develop it as an isolated software, but as the core hub that connects, protects, and observes the entire microservice ecosystem.

For example, find a balance between efficient routing and security protection to make traffic scheduling fast and stable; make complex current limiting and circuit breaker rules like building blocks that can be flexibly combined, instead of a bunch of parameters that need to be memorized. More importantly, they focus on the visualization of the entire service link, making the "black box" transparent and shortening problem location from hours to minutes.

Some users have talked to us, what is the most intuitive feeling after introducing such a gateway? He said: "The development team is more daring to release new features because they know that there is reliable protection at the entrance. The number of times the operation and maintenance is woken up by alarms in the middle of the night has been reduced by more than half. This is not a question of how much manpower is saved, but that the entire system finally has a sense of order."

This sense of order is a key step for the microservice architecture to move from chaos to maturity. Your system deserves a smart and reliable "traffic director" instead of a bunch of exhausted "temporary traffic police". It’s time to build a smart and solid boundary for your service matrix.

Established in 2005,kpowerhas been dedicated to a professional compact motion unit manufacturer, headquartered in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China. Leveraging innovations in modular drive technology,kpowerintegrates high-performance motors, precision reducers, and multi-protocol control systems to provide efficient and customized smart drive system solutions. Kpower has delivered professional drive system solutions to over 500 enterprise clients globally with products covering various fields such as Smart Home Systems, Automatic Electronics, Robotics, Precision Agriculture, Drones, and Industrial Automation.