As a recap from the last article , Uber’s API Gateway provides an interface and acts as a single point of access for all of our back-end services t

Scaling of Uber's API gateway | Uber Engineering Blog

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2021-06-10 06:30:12

As a recap from the last article , Uber’s API Gateway provides an interface and acts as a single point of access for all of our back-end services to expose features and data to Mobile and 3rd party partners. Two major components for a system like API Gateway are configuration management and runtime . The runtime component is responsible for authenticating, authorizing, transforming, and routing requests to appropriate downstream services, and passing responses back to Mobile. The configuration management component is responsible for managing the workflow for developers to easily configure their endpoints on the gateway. This includes making sure the configured endpoints are backward compatible and that no functionalities are regressed during runtime. All of Uber’s back-end engineers depend on this component every day to develop, test, and publish their endpoints to the internet.

The reliability and efficiency of such a system are extremely important. As you can imagine, having a reliable and efficient gateway platform contributes directly to both the rider experience (particularly with the runtime component) and the developer experience (where any issues on the configuration management component will negatively impact feature development velocity). While reliability and efficiency of the runtime component are extremely critical as they contribute directly to Uber’s top line, the reliability and efficiency of configuration management are also extremely critical and directly related to Uber’s bottom line.