APIs (Applications Programming Interfaces) are responsible for the sharing of data and communication between applications. This means that they are very important in the applications ecosystem. If a single API fails or does not do what it is supposed to do, it will not affect just a single application, but all the applications that depend on it. This has the potential to lead to losses or closure of businesses.
APIs depend on the API gateway when performing their functions. The API gateway is responsible for ensuring that security is enforced and implemented to make sure that all APIs are secure. It also processes runtime transactions, manages licenses, protects APIs from SQL injection, detects malicious patterns, analyzes and reports on performance, and authenticates and authorizes all users.
Despite all this, there are organizations that fail to set their API gateways correctly. However, there are those that understand what an API gateway is and what it does for them. Such organizations have even gone to a point of using multiple API gateways to make sure that their APIs meet all their requirements. So why do they use multiple API gateways?
Reasons for Using Multiple API Gateways
They Enforce and Implement Security Protocols
Multiple API gateways allow organizations to make sure that their API licenses and policies are enforced and implemented. The first thing that organizations do when launching a new API is to ensure that they have selected all the security requirements needed for the API. After that, they drive the requirements through their multiple API gateways to enforce and implement them. Even though they are many, the gateways work together as a cluster, something that can be referred to as API gateway aggregation.
Organizations using multiple API gateways are able to improve the security of their applications in a number of ways. First of all, the gateways are responsible for licensing, authorization, authentication, and detecting malicious patterns among others. They also make sure that security policies such as banking protocols, schema validation for JSON and XML, OAuth 2.0, and MTLS among others are enforced.
In addition, using multiple API gateways makes it possible for organizations to categorize their environments and applications based on how sensitive they are to the organization. They do this because, with the multiple gateways, they can dedicate a single gateway to manage all the APIs associated with the sensitive applications. This gateway not only protects those particular APIs, but also the entire backend system from any security threats.
They Make Sure that APIs are Readily and Highly Available
APIs have revolutionized application interconnection. This explains the reason why some organizations are able to meet all their requirements with one data center while others need many data centers spread across the world. That notwithstanding, they all need multiple API gateways to make sure that their APIs are readily and highly available. For instance, those with many data centers use multiple API gateways to ensure that the management of regional API traffic is enforced as required in each region. This accelerates availability, performance and improves security.
But how are they able to do this? Let us take an example of an organization that uses several API gateways in multiple data centers across the world. Such an organization is able to strategically distribute the processing of their APIs compared to those that do not use multiple API gateways. In a situation where they have one of the gateways or even the entire data center going down, they can route their traffic to another data center or gateways before their customers can realize it.
In addition, in situations where a data center gets API requests from regions they do not support or recognize, they are able to block the calls or even filter them to make sure that they never go through. This ensures that no matter what happens, their APIs are always available, meaning that their customers will always get all the services they need without interruptions.
In conclusion, it is important to note that different organizations use different combinations of applications, databases, and technologies. They all need to understand the importance of managing and exposing their applications through the use of APIs. They also need to make sure that they are using the right set of API gateways to streamline their operations.
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