API gateways are an integral part of microservices architecture in recent years. An API gateway provides a single point of entry for all our apps and

The Architecture of Uber's API gateway | Uber Engineering Blog

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2021-05-22 10:00:02

API gateways are an integral part of microservices architecture in recent years. An API gateway provides a single point of entry for all our apps and provides an interface to access data, logic, or functionality from back-end microservices. It also provides a centralized place to implement many high-level responsibilities, including routing, protocol conversion, rate limiting, load shedding, header enrichment and propagation, data center affinity enforcement, security auditing, user access blocking, mobile client generation, and others.

In our last article , we walked through multiple generations of Uber’s API gateway evolution and our design choices in each phase. In this article, we will take a deeper dive into the technical components of a self-serve API gateway system.

At the most abstract level, a gateway is yet another service serving data through APIs. Gateways come in many flavors and cover a wide spectrum, from low-level load balancers acting as API gateway, to a very feature-rich, application-level load balancer that operates on the request and response payloads in those APIs. At Uber, we developed a feature-rich API gateway that is capable of complex operations on the incoming and outgoing data payload across multiple protocols.

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