IMPROVING API ARCHITECTURE
Open the door to better API management.
The power of HAProxy is the perfect match for a gateway into your API architecture. Scalable, secure, and always lightning fast.
Key Principles
Application programming interfaces (APIs) form the backbone of today’s web. Whether they’re consumed by web pages, mobile apps, or remote IoT devices, APIs grant access to your business logic and data.
After 20 years as the world’s fastest software load balancer, our solutions are the ideal choice for a gateway into these modern systems.
API Gateways manage and scale the number of clients an API can support, while requiring security, observability, and high-performance load balancing. Products like HAProxy Enterprise and HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller are the perfect choice for API Gateways. Deployable in the cloud, on-premises, or as part of a Kubernetes infrastructure.
What is an API Gateway?
An API Gateway is installed on a server in front of your APIs. Clients connect to the gateway, which presents services at a single IP address. Routing determines which API service to forward a client’s request to.
Learn how to implement gateway into your API architecture
Discovering the Versatility of HAProxy Enterprise with Willhaben
API GATEWAY PLAYBOOK
The Demands of An API System
Building a gateway into these modern networks requires a sophisticated load balancing solution that can stand up to the rigors of a microservices architecture. Here are some examples that show how HAProxy Technologies’ suite of products are the right tool for the task.
Flexible Load Balancing
SOLUTIONS:
Powerful Balancing Algorithms
Advanced Health Checks
Flexible Load Balancing
Optimize the performance and reliability of your APIs by distributing requests evenly across a pool of servers. With HAProxy Enterprise, you can choose the load balancing algorithm that’s best suited for your type of service, including round robin, fewest connections, and consistent hash.
The systematic and detailed health checks offered by the HAProxy Technologies’ suite of products continually monitor your servers for downtime and errors, and will ensure that failed servers are detected swiftly so that clients can be routed to healthy endpoints.
Customizable Routing
SOLUTIONS:
Flexible Client Routing
Logical Operator Support
Customizable Routing
An API gateway requires complex routing capabilities, and it is here that the HAProxy suite of products stand out. With a powerful syntax for defining routes, companies can consolidate many APIs behind a single address, simplifying discovery and use of their data. This also enables easy maintenance, meaning simplified API updates.
Using HAProxy Enterprise as an entrypoint to your APIs also means 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.
Better Security
SOLUTIONS:
Rate Limiting
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
High-Performance SSL/TLS
Better Security
Placing API servers behind an HAProxy Enterprise load balancer narrows the attack surface available to hackers. With all traffic flowing through a single entrypoint, you can enforce rate limits, deflect bad bots, block attacks with the web application firewall, and enable token-based access control.
Choose different response policies to deter unwanted clients including blocking, silently dropping, tarpitting, shadowbanning, or displaying a reCAPTCHA. Your HAProxy Enterprise load balancer can also take care of certificate management, with high-performance SSL/TLS enabling secure communication.
Observable and Accelerated APIs
SOLUTIONS:
Customizable Logging
Connection Pooling
HTTP Compression
Response Caching
Observable and Accelerated APIs
HAProxy Enterprise collects over 100 metrics that help you stay ahead of trouble, meaning unrivaled observability over your system. Stream that data to Prometheus, InfluxDB or another time-series database to see long-term trends. Customizable logs also provide insight into every step of a client’s session.
In addition, by offloading work to an HAProxy Enterprise load balancer, you can greatly increase server performance. With features like advanced HTTP compression to shrink server responses, connection pooling for efficient use of idle connections, and response caching to lower server load. Fine-grained tuning options let you optimize for your type of traffic.
Download the eBook: HAProxy as an API Gateway
With the help of this eBook, you will learn how to utilize HAProxy as an API Gateway. Including the skills necessary to route and load balance HTTP traffic, cache API responses, enable health checking of backend services, authenticate users, and much more.