API Gateways
The single entry point, and the business logic that must stay out of it.
3 to work through
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advanced
A blockchain infrastructure provider serves RPC requests where a small number of query types are enormously more expensive than the rest. How should the request path be structured?
2 min answer -
advanced
An API platform serving millions of external developers must place authentication, rate limiting, quotas, retries, idempotency and tenant isolation. Which belong at the gateway and which must live deeper?
2 min answer -
advanced
Your API gateway configuration has grown to 8,000 lines with request transformations and cross-service orchestration. Changes require a platform team ticket and take two weeks. How do you fix this?
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Cost-Weighted Rate Limiting
Limiting callers by the resources their requests consume rather than by request count, because on any API where request cost varies by orders of magn…
patternGateway Offloading
Moving cross-cutting concerns — TLS termination, authentication, rate limiting, compression, logging — from every service into the gateway.
conceptGateway Timeout Chain
The sequence of timeouts from client through load balancer, gateway and service, which must decrease inward or produce confusing failures.
toolNetwork API Gateways
The ingress component that terminates external connections and routes into the estate — considered from the network rather than the API-management angle.
Neighbouring topics
Networking
General material on the network path underneath an architecture.
TCP/IP
Handshakes, congestion control, head-of-line blocking and connection reuse.
HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3
Multiplexing, prioritisation and the transport each is built on.
DNS
Resolution, TTL behaviour, traffic steering and failover latency.
TLS & Certificates
Encryption, integrity, authentication, termination points and expiry.
Layer 4 vs Layer 7
Connection-level versus request-level balancing, and what each unlocks.
Reverse Proxies
One place for TLS, routing, caching, compression and rate limiting.
Content Delivery Networks
Edge caching, origin offload, spike absorption and dynamic content.
Firewalls & Security Groups
Default-deny, stateful rules, and restricting egress as well as ingress.
NAT & Egress
Outbound-only connectivity, its per-gigabyte cost and its zone binding.
VPC Design
Address planning, peering and the ranges you can never resize.
Subnetting
Tiering, zone binding, and sizing for an address-hungry platform.
Routing & BGP
How traffic finds you, anycast, and route withdrawal as a failure mode.
Service Mesh Networking
Sidecar proxies supplying mTLS, retries and traffic policy.
WebSockets & Realtime
Persistent bidirectional connections and the capacity model they impose.
gRPC Transport
HTTP/2 multiplexing, binary encoding and streaming semantics.
Network Performance
Latency floors, bandwidth-delay product, and what no code change fixes.
Private Connectivity
Private endpoints, peering and dedicated links to managed services.
Network Troubleshooting
Flow logs, packet paths, and localising a problem to a hop.