The Role of API Gateways in Microservice Architectures

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Despite their differences in nomenclature, newly emerging service meshesaren’t all that different that API Gateways, and the similarities between the two will continue to grow over time, so predicts Marco Palladino, Chief Technology Officer of API Gateway provider Mashape.

The two technologies actually offer quite similar functionality, Palladino noted. API Gateways, such as Amazon Web Services‘ API Gateway or Mashape’s own open source Kong, have been primarily used over the last decade or so for mapping external traffic to internal resources, whereas the more recently developed service meshes — such as Lyft’s Envoy or Uber’s Catylist— have been primarily been on brokering internal resources in a microservices architecture.

“When you think of gateways, you usually think of a centralized layer, an extra hop in the network that is processing additional features. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be true,” Palladino said, speaking at MesosCon 2017, held last week in Los Angeles. 

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