DevOps
API gateway solutions manage, secure, and optimize connections between different apps, ensuring efficient and secure API interactions.
Last updated on Jul 08, 2024
Written by Joel Witts
Technical review by Laura Iannini
Share
The Top 8 API Gateways Include:
- 1. Amazon API Gateway
- 2. Azure API Management
- 3. Boomi API Management
- 4. Google API Gateway
- 5. IBM API Connect
- 6. Kong Gateway
- 7. MuleSoft Anypoint Flex Gateway
- 8. WSO2 API Manager
API gateways process all API requests made between applications and deliver the requested data into one place. Because they sit at the center of all API calls made between applications, they are used to facilitate traffic management, security, authentication, and access to app data. Using an API gateway, teams can configure key policies such as rate limiting, caching, service discovery, load balancing, and usage analysis with comprehensive reports.
API Gateways are crucial components in modern application development due to their role in serving as a bridge between internal APIs and external clients. An API gateway solution integrates with various back-end services to enable management control and enhance security by enforcing authentication and authorization. This protects your valuable data and services, resulting in a seamless user experience – the end user can view all requested API data in a single place, such as an admin console showcasing data from multiple apps. Some businesses may also charge for API usage – for this use case, API gateways can monitor usage and protect API traffic to ensure good service for customers.
There are a number of API gateway providers on the market, offering a variety of solutions to cater to individual business requirements. These solutions may also include additional features such as API lifecycle management, developer portal, and API analytics. To help you navigate the landscape, we’ve put together a list of the top API gateway solutions, based on industry recognition, technical capabilities, and customer satisfaction.
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that is designed to help developers create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs on a large scale. The platform provides access to data, business logic, and functionality from backend services, with support for both RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. It caters to containerized, serverless, and web applications, enabling it to manage tasks such as traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management.
There are no minimum fees or startup costs associated with Amazon API Gateway, as users pay for received API calls and transferred data amounts. The tiered pricing model allows for cost reductions as API usage increases. Within API Gateway, multiple versions of the same API can run simultaneously to facilitate quick iteration, testing, and release of new versions. It can also handle thousands of API calls. The Gateway ensures low latency for end users by leveraging the global network of edge locations through Amazon CloudFront. In addition, it provides flexible security controls (including identity and access management and a web application firewall), a choice between HTTP APIs and REST APIs to suit different use case requirements, and performance monitoring that offers insights into data latency and error rates.
2
Azure API Management is a hybrid, multicloud management platform designed to streamline API operations from creation to retirement. Aimed at fostering growth among innovative enterprises, Azure API Management offers a highly scalable, integrated platform to manage APIs hosted in Azure, other clouds, and on-premises systems. Whilst optimizing API traffic flow, the platform ensures that security and compliance requirements are met, as well as providing a unified management experience and delivering comprehensive observability across all internal and external APIs.
Azure API Management applies authentication, authorization, and usage limits. It enables businesses to build apps faster and enhance value for customers through API-first approaches. In addition, the platform offers customizable developer portals that enable users to share APIs with internal teams, external partners, and customers. It can also turn legacy web services into modern REST-based APIs for seamless integration.
Azure API Management ensures comprehensive security and compliance by offering OAuth2, JWT validation, and IP filtering. The platform is available in more than 40 regions globally and provides scalable pricing options for businesses. Azure API Management serves as a significant component in API operations, facilitating effective request routing, verifying credentials, enforcing usage quotas, transforming requests, caching responses, and providing logs, metrics, and traces for monitoring and troubleshooting.
Boomi API Management is a platform that enables businesses to deploy and manage APIs with ease, supporting the full lifecycle of APIs in different environments. Through an intuitive interface, the solution allows users to configure APIs and expose real-time integrations. It also focuses on controlling and governing data access, which is achievable through its API Gateway feature.
With Boomi API Management, users can easily publish and govern APIs on-prem, in the cloud, or at the edge. The platform also offers mediation, which provides abstractions between published APIs and their underlying integrations, versioning, policy management, application management, and a Developer Portal packed with features to help boost engagement. In terms of security, the platform offers comprehensive third-party authentication as well as API monitoring, which delivers historical and current insights into API health.
Google API Gateway allows teams to create, deploy, secure, and manage APIs for Google Cloud serverless back ends, including Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, and App Engine. Built on the Envoy platform, Google API Gateway boasts high performance and scalability, making it easier for organizations to focus on creating exceptional applications.
Google API Gateway simplifies the process of managing APIs for both internal use and external access, ensuring consistency and user-friendliness. The platform’s built-in security mechanisms, such as authentication and key validation, protect published services, while granting admins insight into API performance through monitoring, logging, and tracing services.
With Google API Gateway, organizations can seamlessly establish secure access to backend services through a consistent REST API. App developers can use these REST APIs to create applications for various platforms without having to modify deployed apps due to changes in backend implementation. In addition, Google API Gateway’s integration with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) enables users to benefit from the system’s built-in features such as hosting, logging, monitoring, and traffic management.
Google API Gateway streamlines the process of updating and managing APIs. By controlling API access through authentication mechanisms like API keys, GCP service accounts, and Google ID tokens, users can dictate what authenticated individuals can do with their APIs. It also allows developers to share APIs effortlessly with others and monitor API activity, including usage metrics, logs, latency, traffic, and errors.
IBM API Connect is an integrated API management solution designed to securely control and mediate access to your APIs throughout their entire lifecycle, using the security-rich features of IBM DataPower Gateway. This API gateway is built to protect data and business applications both on-premises and across different cloud environments.
IBM API Connect aims to reduce cost and complexity in managing distributed environments by offering a singular gateway for both on-premises and cloud infrastructures. Users can manage APIs for internal use or share them with app developers via a company-branded portal, and test them using the platform’s AI and automation capabilities. The solution simplifies troubleshooting by providing near real-time transaction visibility through centralized operations. In terms of security, IBM API Connect manages threats and exposures through a robust connectivity layer, and offers support for various identity authentication standards, such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and JSON Web Token (JWT). The platform also enables faster development by facilitating the deployment of new services with built-in protocol and payload transformation support.
In addition, IBM offers API Connect Enterprise as a Service, a cloud-based edition of their API management solution. With API Connect Enterprise as a Service, management of the platform is handled by IBM, allowing users to focus on creating and managing APIs without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Kong Gateway is a lightweight, highly scalable, and flexible cloud-native API gateway designed for developers. Built on a widely adopted and trusted open-source technology, it is powered by an ultra-lightweight NGINX engine that can handle over 50,000 transactions per second per node. Kong Gateway is suitable for use across any cloud, platform, or protocol, and it’s optimized for microservices and distributed architectures.
Kong Gateway offers deployment-agnostic installation options and can operate across any environment, platform, or implementation pattern, from on-premises to cloud, Kubernetes, and serverless. It comes with a range of out-of-the-box security, authentication, transformation, and analytics plugins, allowing for granular control over API traffic. Custom plugins can also be easily developed using Kong’s Plugin Development Kit.
Kong Gateway supports end-to-end automation of the API and microservices lifecycle through declarative configuration, making it easy for developers to apply DevOps and GitOps principles. Built with Kubernetes in mind, it can be configured to match Kubernetes using the Kong Ingress Controller, allowing for seamless traffic management, transformations, and observability across clusters without downtime. Finally, the gateway’s open-source DNA and large developer community provide access to shared resources, knowledge, and best practices for building and deploying APIs.
MuleSoft Anypoint Flex Gateway is a high-performance solution that enables developers to develop, deploy, discover, amend, and secure APIs running across various environments. It extends to all APIs, providing a seamless integration with DevOps and CI/CD workflows. This gateway enables teams to manage any service, regardless of size, language, or cloud, while maintaining consistent security and manageability.
The Anypoint Flex Gateway is quick to set up, adaptable, and supports various architectures, including microservices and monoliths, making it suitable for deployment in cloud-native or containerized environments. This adaptability leads to reduced application response times and cost savings. Users can deploy the Anypoint Flex Gateway using a web interface or declarative configuration files commonly known to developers, allowing easy integration with CI/CD automation. The Anypoint Flex Gateway also offers a full set of authentication, security, quality of service, and traffic management policies with zero trust implemented by default.
MuleSoft’s platform is a comprehensive toolset for API and integration projects, enabling businesses to accelerate their application delivery by building APIs efficiently and quickly. Users can leverage pre-built assets from the MuleSoft ecosystem or discover APIs through their CI/CD pipelines, build APIs from scratch, automatically transform data, test APIs and integrations, and plug enterprise integrations into CI/CD pipelines with built-in support for Maven and Jenkins.
WSO2 API Manager is a customizable, open-source platform designed for managing the entire lifecycle of APIs. The platform offers a broad range of capabilities for API designers, product managers, operations, and consumers, and it’s compatible with various enterprise architectures, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
WSO2 API Manager supports a wide array of scenarios and protocols. It enables seamless interoperability between systems using modern approaches like REST, GraphQL, and AsyncAPIs. In addition, the platform provides advanced integration support, such as message routing, transformation, service orchestration, and streaming data processing. Plus, users can easily expose integration services as managed APIs in the API marketplace, and create a managed API with a single click. Users can also revise API changes easily and seamlessly restore previous versions of APIs.
WSO2 API Manager places a strong emphasis on security and compliance, featuring essential security measures like OAuth access control, fine-grained policies, and threat protection mechanisms. The platform provides extensions for advanced security, authentication, and identity management, while also offering pre-built open-source solutions for regulated sectors like healthcare and finance. Furthermore, WSO2 API Manager supports flexible deployment models, allowing users to choose the most suitable option for their needs.
WSO2 API Manager is trusted by numerous enterprises and government agencies worldwide. As an open-source solution, it allows for transparency, rapid innovation, integration, and long-term sustainability. The platform’s flexibility and robust foundation make it a reliable choice for managing APIs of all sizes and complexities.
Everything You Need To Know About API Gateways (FAQs)
What Are API Gateways?
API (Application Programming Interface) gateways manage all API calls that are made, processing requests and delivering data to the right users. API gateways process all API calls made from any number of applications and ensures it is delivered to the right user in the right place. They are an important component of application infrastructure as they collect data from various applications and present it to users, while providing centralized control for developers.
API gateways are critical for many applications or websites which need to pull data from multiple services into one place. A typical business website may need to pull in reviews from Google, data from maps, a payment gateway, and an instant messaging service – all of this will involve using an API gateway to collect and display the data.
API gateways also enable admins to enforce security policies, monitor API usage, and view comprehensive reports in order to ensure API usage is compliant and secure. They can help to reduce complexity by ensuring all API calls share the same workflow and provide real-time metrics to help troubleshoot issues.
How Do API Gateways Work?
API gateways are a single point of entry for API calls. The API gateway sits a central point for all calls to be processed and displayed to the right users at the right time. The gateway collects all API requests and returns the processed data into the correct application.
For example, if you were a building a logistics system, you may have one application processing sales, and one application tracking outgoing expenses. You could use an API gateway to pull both data sets into one dashboard, along with any other required data such as stock inventory or order status.
What Features Do API Gateways Include?
When considering an API gateway, there are a number of important capabilities to review.
Security policies should include authentication for accessing data and encrypting key data flows. This is important for all API calls, but particularly for sensitive data such as medical records and other forms of PII.
API gateways are similar to load balancing solutions in that admins are able to configure policies around ensuring optimal performance and managing spikes in API usage. Make sure to consider solutions with granular traffic management policies around routing and rate limiting.
Finally, the best API gateways will offer granular analytics and reports with real-time logs and metrics to help troubleshoot issues and ensure the smooth running of your applications. Make sure to also consider the admin experience and deployment processes to ensure the best fit for your organization.
Other Solutions To Consider
We researched lots of API gateway solutions while we were making this guide. Here are a few other tools worth your consideration:
- Software AG API Management: An enterprise-grade API management platform that enables development teams to build, manage, and monetize APIs.
- Tyk: An API management platform that provides Platform teams with centralized, automated, and composable API management and governance.
Joel Witts
Content Director
Joel Witts is the Content Director at Expert Insights, meaning he oversees all articles published and topics covered. He is an experienced journalist and writer, specialising in identity and access management, Zero Trust, cloud business technologies, and cybersecurity. Joel is a co-host of the Expert Insights Podcast and conducts regular interviews with leading B2B tech industry experts, including directors at Microsoft and Google. Joel holds a First Class Honours degree in Journalism from Cardiff University.
Laura Iannini
Cybersecurity Analyst
Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.
