API Gateway — Roadmap
Build your own with nginx, Kong, or Envoy. Auth, rate limit, route, transform.
Real-World Analogy
A hotel concierge desk: every guest goes through one point of contact that handles directions, reservations, security checks, and special requests — so none of the individual hotel departments have to deal with these concerns themselves. An API gateway is that concierge: one entry point in front of your services that handles routing, authentication, rate limiting, and request transformation, so your backends stay focused on domain logic.
What you will learn
An API gateway is the single door into your system. Done well, it centralizes cross-cutting concerns — auth, rate limiting, routing, observability — so every backend service doesn’t have to reimplement them. This track starts with what a gateway actually is and when you need one, then builds up to routing rules, JWT/API-key auth at the edge, rate limiting algorithms, request transformation, and the observability and operational patterns that keep a gateway reliable in production.
Chapters in this track
- What Is an API Gateway — single entry point, what it handles, nginx vs Kong vs Envoy, when not to use one
- Routing & Load Balancing — path matching, header-based routing, weighted splits, health-aware balancing
- Auth at the Gateway — JWT verification, API key validation, OAuth token introspection, forwarding identity to backends
- Rate Limiting at the Gateway — fixed window, sliding window, token bucket, per-user and per-endpoint limits
- Request & Response Transformation — header manipulation, payload reshaping, protocol translation REST→gRPC
- Observability & Production Gateway — access logs, distributed tracing, circuit breakers, operational checklist