What is an API Gateway?
API Gateways have become a critical component in the current Microservices based architectures, providing common functionalities required by APIs such as routing, API authentication, access control, rate limiting, billing, capturing analytics, monitoring and providing much needed decoupling between a client and the backend services. To understand further onto what an API gateway is, it is best to start from how it has evolved to exist. There are two clearly identifiable categories of API gateways in the market; Reverse proxy products that revolved into becoming API gateways, adding features to the core product eg. Nginx API Manager vendors who broke their monolithic application into microservices which let one of those to be API gateway. Starting from the first category is best to understand the initial requirements. Reverse proxies were already in the market, addressing the need of hiding the internal details of a system and providing an abstract interface for the external parties, i