API Gateway Configuration
Table of Contents
Overview
Design and configure API gateways to handle routing, authentication, rate limiting, and request/response transformation for microservice architectures.
When to Use
- Setting up reverse proxies for microservices
- Centralizing API authentication
- Implementing request/response transformation
- Managing traffic across backend services
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement
- API versioning and routing
Quick Start
Minimal working example:
yaml# kong.yml - Kong Gateway configuration _format_version: "2.1" _transform: true services: - name: user-service url: http://user-service:3000 routes: - name: user-routes paths: - /api/users - /api/profile plugins: - name: rate-limiting config: minute: 100 policy: local - name: jwt config: secret: your-secret-key key_claim_name: "sub" - name: cors config: origins: - "http://localhost:3000" // ... (see reference guides for full implementation)
Reference Guides
Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:
| Guide | Contents |
|---|---|
| Kong Configuration | Kong Configuration |
| Nginx Configuration | Nginx Configuration |
| AWS API Gateway Configuration | AWS API Gateway Configuration |
| Traefik Configuration | Traefik Configuration |
| Node.js Gateway Implementation | Node.js Gateway Implementation |
Best Practices
✅ DO
- Centralize authentication at gateway level
- Implement rate limiting globally
- Add comprehensive logging
- Use health checks for backends
- Cache responses when appropriate
- Implement circuit breakers
- Monitor gateway metrics
- Use HTTPS in production
❌ DON'T
- Expose backend service details
- Skip request validation
- Forget to log API usage
- Use weak authentication
- Over-cache dynamic data
- Ignore backend timeouts
- Skip security headers
- Expose internal IPs
