An API gateway is an infrastructure component that helps organizations manage and scale the number of clients an API can support. These gateways don't just boost scalability, but also improve performance, security, and observability. API gateways are an increasingly crucial piece of the load balancing puzzle, as they're ubiquitous across organizations and industries.
How does an API gateway work?
Sitting between clients and the APIs they're trying to access, an API gateway distributes API requests to targeted backend services. The API gateway is installed on a server and presents services using a single IP address, before routing rules determine where requests travel. This setup simplifies discovery and maintenance since you're only dealing with one entrypoint. Some solutions even incorporate high availability features, such as health checks, to enable closer server monitoring.
API gateways employ load balancing algorithms (such as round-robin and fewest connections), various parameters (such as URLs, source IP addresses, domain names, and more), and logical operators to customize or combine routing behaviors.
Finally, gateways often translate protocols and convert between the different communication protocols (such as between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2) used by clients and services.
What makes an API gateway useful?
Aside from routing, API gateways provide the following:
Stronger security – As part of an application delivery platform, API gateways commonly include rate limiting, access control, and even deeper security measures like a WAF or bot management.
Improved performance – Features like HTTP compression, connection pooling, and response caching help deliver APIs to users even faster.
Better observability – Logging and metrics collection help organizations understand API performance, reliability, and overall usage patterns.
Greater reliability – By monitoring the health of backends, circuit breaking, and triggering retries, an API gateway ensures that clients receive responses with fewer unexpected failures.
Does HAProxy offer API gateway support?
Yes! HAProxy Enterprise users can enable API gateway functionality by acting as a single entrypoint for your APIs.
You can define pools of servers and relay clients through to them with the broad range of routing options available, whether by URL, domain name, geolocation, device type, or source IP address. With support for logical operators, you can also combine rules in a variety of ways.
High-performance SSL/TLS provides a security boost alongside the HAProxy Enterprise WAF and HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module. HAProxy not only lets you route traffic effectively, but also shields your APIs against today's most common threats.
