What is an API Gateway?

api is an acronym for application programming interface which is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other so every time you use an app like instagram you send us a message or check travel prices for your next vacation you're using an api apis can make or break applications and have to require additional infrastructure to secure scale and accelerate and this is the case now more than ever as organizations are modernizing their large legacy monolithic applications into smaller individual microservices these microservices are loosely coupled in order to make your apps more scalable highly available and resource efficient just to name a few however the outcome of using a microservice oriented architecture comes with many more api calls going between your clients and your microservices so how do you securely manage this influx of api traffic for distributed system well with an api gateway hell i even purchased this nifty schmedium t-shirt with an api gateway and the first lucky viewer who answers my api gateway question towards the end of this video in the comments section won their own version of this t-shirt so now let's take a deeper look into how an api gateway can both improve the user and developer experience for an online store so let's start off an example here let's say we have a fictitious e-commerce storefront indies custom threads and in this store you can order customized t-shirts kind of like my nifty api gateway t-shirt here so let's walk through the scenario right we'd have our users here and then they would make the purchase and look at the t-shirts on the website through these different clients right so you have your web application here which would be a standard web browser we'd have our mobile client as well it could be ios it could be android and then we also have a third-party api integration service right so this could be if you want to integrate your website with like say something like facebook or in our case we have a review api that's integrated through a third party so say you see someone makes a comment about the t-shirt and they're like man the t-shirt fit comfortable but the 50 polyester really gave me a bad skin rash that would all be possible through this third-party integrated service so now that we've established our users and our clients now let's take a look at the actual product detail ui right so there's a lot of different functionality a lot of different tasks that we've broken down into these micro services here and this originally would be a monolithic application like we previously talked about but we've we've broken it apart and segmented it into different services so as you can see the first one here is the product info service this would be stuff like you know look at the t-shirt what kind of color is a t-shirt is it black red the size of the t-shirt large medium and so on and then we have our pricing service we have our order service if you want to look at purchase history you got the inventory service and the review service and so on and this is just a handful of different microservices here we could have many more so that's just a very quick rudimentary overview of direct client to microservice communication architecture so let's take a look at what an api gateway architecture might look like let's get rid of these okay so api gateway the topic of the hour so your api gateway would reside right here in the middle between your clients and your microservices and there are numerous benefits with implementing an api gateway solution i'm just going to go over just a couple main ones right now so the first main benefit is client performance i'm just going to put perf or short so in our last example we had our clients making a bunch of api requests to each individual microservice so in this instance with our api gateway which would essentially be like a reverse proxy or you could even consider it like a api traffic controller you would take those requests and then route them to the appropriate microservice so this has numerous benefits right because now instead of having all those individual requests go into each microservice now you can filter it through your api gateway and this reduces latency so now your product detail ui page will run much more efficient much faster and it's a better client experience because you don't have as many round trips right because our last example say you had a request come in it went to the product info service but you're pricing microservices speak with the product one so you would have to go back to the client back to pricing and so on so this reduces those round trips here and on top of just being a better you know client performance it also helps the development team as well because they don't have to manage and maintain all those individual api requests now they can do this all through the api gateway so the next main benefit is security so by having this api gateway right here we essentially have a security barrier in front of our front-end clients right our front-end api endpoints because otherwise we had everything wide open right and you're not susceptible to like a dos denial of service attack or any other malicious attack with this api gateway and you could add other services within this api gateway like authentication authorization to add another layer of security and this leads me to my next benefit which is protocol translation so if you recall we had to have the same internet friendly protocol going from our clients to the microservice in order for it to function and operate here we could say we have https that's again a secure credential but we can change the protocol here we could just go http for each api request that's routed and by removing the s and that secure credential where you don't have to authenticate this is ssl termination where the ssl stands for secure socket layer and this is a process where you decrypt and offload the encrypted ssl data within the api gateway instead of going to our backend microservices so by doing this this greatly helps performance of our e-commerce storefront as you can see although i don't know why we don't have any more spendiums you don't even have to have you know internet friendly you can even have server-side protocols like amqp so you have a larger reach right you have more usability with your e-commerce storefront because you could have other protocols the last quick benefit i want to mention is common functionality defunct offload so we're off floating these common functionalities for every market service that we had to have in order for it to operate right so now we can take some of that business logic and put in this api gateway you can just have your microservices running a little bit more efficiently and smoother because we're just focusing on their tasks that they really need to focus on they don't need all that other business logic so you could have stuff like rate limiting you could have tin requests for every 60 seconds if you want to put a cap on that to help with demand you could also have stuff like api monitoring and logging if you want to keep it on the api health and how everything's working operational wise and there's just so much more and that's just a few there's a lot more standard features typically with an api gateway solution so this is great and all but what if we get an instance where say you get a huge spike in traffic and indy's custom thread is preparing for black friday oh my god we're going to get so much traffic what are we going to do you got users here you've got users here well we could install and implement a bff architecture and no i'm not saying best friend forever although i will be your best friend if you like this video i'm talking about back in to front and and essentially what this is is you're adding additional api gateways so for this one for instance this would be our dedicated web api gateway so here we could have one for our mobile devices right you could have another api gateway and this would just be dedicated to your you know native os and android devices and it would take all that api traffic coming for those devices and routing them to the right microservices and this is you know you could have this for the third party integration service as well and there's other clients as well you can have here you could have like iot devices with sensors right um so this is a great benefit if you're going to have a huge demand and spike with traffic or say you're just adding a lot more functionality and features to your your e-commerce storefront so this would be a great architecture to consider to expand and scale up so this is just a very quick overview of api gateway i hope you found it helpful oh and before i forget i didn't forget the t-shirt if you want to get it my question to you is what is ssl termination drop an answer in the comment section and then we'll make sure to ship you the t-shirt and we'll get your details through there so thank you so much for watching again i hope this high level overview has been helpful thank you if you have questions please drop us a line below if you want to see more videos like this in the future please like and subscribe and don't forget you can grow your skills and earn a badge with ibm cloud labs which are free browser-based interactive kubernetes labs

Channel: IBM Technology

Views: 24,127

Keywords: API Gateway, API, API Management, microservices, IBM, IBM Cloud, web application, ecommerce, website, frontend, backend, dog

Id: hWRRdICvMNs

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021