What is API Gateway?

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Covering topics and trends in large-scale system design, from the authors of the best-selling System Design Interview series.

[@sonumatrix]

Alex, your explanations are incredibly clear and straightforward. I appreciate your simplicity, making it easy to comprehend. Thank you.

[@tr33squid]

I love everything about these videos, thank you for the time you've spent making each one of these. Has it been considered by your team to do the OSI model in the future?

[@j0p1n0y3]

I bought 2 of your system design interview, they're both very good. Your video with diagrams is really helpful and easy to understand the technical details. It must be nice to have you as a mentor.

[@vishalrajole9278]

Simple and yet detailed overview. Enjoyed watching it. Would appreciate if you can also share pros and cons of such architectural patterns/services.

[@lopella]

I really appreciate these short videos that you do and how do you explain things. Thank you.

[@gauravkumarmnnit]

Your video is like a pill of multi-concepts one can watch it in couple of minutes, very precise and to the point, videos animation is just satisfying ❤

[@ronaik]

Love your videos and have recommended your channel and blogs to my fellow colleagues. I used to love watching Keith Barker (CBT Nuggets) during my early days, your videos are in similar lines with great explanations and animations. I work at F5 and many of these technologies are what I work on day in day out, so feel free to reach out for any inputs. Some topics I would like to suggest are DDOS, DNS, VPN, LB, NAT, BGP, etc. Good luck!

I'd worked with very basic API GW configurations in AWS, and this video was useful to have a quick list of all the advantages of this technology. I'll continue exploring its features. Thanks.

[@erickvidbaz3086]

Such a beautiful video!!! straight to the point, easy to understand... THANK YOU!

[@coffeebeans6073]

This is the simplest I have seen it. Great job!

[@mohammadanas3320]

Great visual, to the point, concise just like always. Many thanks.

[@dawidos0095]

Your newsletter is a great read. Thanks!

[@dassanghamitra]

very crisp and all detailed video .. not lengthy , easy to understand and remember ❤

[@user-code]

Love your content on system design. Great work

[@jyothsnaradha2851]

you are mind blowing. i started searching for your channel for every concept.

[@stoneshou]

Wow ! Another long awaited video, and another great video!

[@illbet4589]

Found your channel on linkedin. Absolutely valuable info you all provide for young developers. Subscribed

[@SteffanBoodhoo]

these videos are so high quality, so succinct

[@kostaad]

100% best videos on compsci topics. Thank you

[@hoangnamcao3912]

Thanks so much. It helps me understand the gateway and what's missing

[@marcosd.2917]

Great explanation, Alex. Best explanation I found.

[@ksaweryglab]

You are the man! Have the first book and the sub to your System Design series.

[@BrendanPramjee]

Brilliant vid simple and easy to understand. 👌🏼

[@sachinthatte9672]

Amazing explanation, clear and concise.

[@irynasribna7580]

Thanks a lot! Great explanation!

[@leomysky]

Thanks for clarifying this topic

[@user-nd9tf9nb2q]

Thx for your video, easy to understand

[@subramanianchenniappan4059]

great . thanks . useful for interviews

[@gabrielsoriasouza7537]

I’m loving your videos!!

[@funkindy]

Nice and simple explanation, thank you!

[@ThePuppetMasterDj]

But I just must be stupid then because I understood absolutely everything about what an API does due to his detailed explanation, except for 1 massive piece of important information, what is API!? He explained what it does like I said perfectly but not what API is!! It's just like if I explained what a tap does but never mention that I'm talking about a tap! I've actually got a gaming degree in games design via Train2Game and know a lot about computers from the inside out and literally only came here because I was already on here listening to songs and for some reason API came into my thoughts and do you know when something so simple is on the tip of your tongue but just can't remember what said thing is, well I've completely forgot what it stands for hence why I'm here now, I didn't want to post a main comment due to being so embarrassed, please tell me what an API is, not what it does, sorry for the long rambling.

[@Gabriel-lu3zf]

Very nice work on the videos, thanks 👍. If I can make a suggestion, a video about passkeys(webauthn) and maybe the differences between the Apple/Google implementations(like in your Apple pay/Google pay video) would be really awesome.

[@paragkadam2169]

Great video, covered a lot in this small video

[@Pill-AI]

Thank you great content

[@Bemind69]

Thank for video

[@suteera]

Thank you for this.. Love it.

[@shutanovac]

Another great video 👌

[@sudharsansathiamoorthy1075]

Excellent tutorial 👍👍

[@luser9989]

wow, love your video. Thanks

[@kevinsamuelndoum6992]

Thank you!

[@9unapologeticsanatani]

amazed to see the graphics apart from the content !

[@durgadeep4988]

Short and sweet.

[@dalbeersingh1788]

This is a great video!

[@indaneeydesign165]

Very helpful 👌 thank you

[@TykAPIM]

Excellent video! 👏🤩

[@bestplay2514]

Amazing explanation! can you please do a video on payment gateway?

[@robin_zhang]

awesome video, tks

[@cverde1234]

Great video!

[@WarunaTennakoon]

I enjoy your videos. May I know how you create these beautiful animations of the flow charts and diagrams?

[@adityaghosalkar431]

Yeah I am also wondering the same

[@h4sh92]

Most likely he pays a professional to do it

[@lorapora]

adobe after effects

[@popo-kx2bn]

Yea I also wondering

[@teokahseong]

Me too. Please let us know.

[@midjhelins8383]

Excellent!

[@johnniefujita]

You are very good man

[@samjones4327]

Once again, awesome tutorial! I'm a new subscriber for sure and look forward to more of your content!!! Be well, be safe and Cheers!!!

[@asanamah]

good explanation

[@certificationcaci6469]

Thanks a lot

[@girish9841]

Excellent

[@ali.khosro]

what software do you use to create such beautiful graphs, presentations, and animations?

[@Md_sadiq_Md]

Pushing the algorithm ❤️❤️

[@ReflectionOcean]

Parameter validation -> allow/deny listing -> authentication/authorization -> rate limiting -> dynamic routing -> service discovery -> Protocol conversion Error handling / logging / monitoring / Circuit breaking / analytics

[@Bohdan-Venhrenovych]

Amazing!

[@justblue4864]

Very nice video. Could you also explain Digital Certificates and client certificate authentication?

[@MahaDev-ps7jk]

Fantastic ..... just curious to know how you design block diagram with this nice graphics

[@fjk89025]

Very nice videos. Concise and easy to understand 😊 I have a question here. What is the difference between api gateway and reverse proxy? It seems they have very similar roles.

[@SubinGeorge26]

Did you get the clarity to it?

[@aashishpandey7157]

Thanks for the video, shall i have to implement circuit breaker and discovery pattern or its inbuilt in Api gateway and no need to implement eternally??

[@Nothing_Else_Matters]

Thank you for this very nice video. I am confused bye the API-Gateway naming. Isnt it a Proxy-Service instead?

[@rpcragesh]

Load balancing and scalability is main key point here

[@minhduong673]

I dont understand much but thank you !!

[@BernardoGarcia19]

Thanks to the bytebyteGo team for these illustrative explanations: I have a question. What could be the difference in using an API Gateway and using a Service Mesh approach? Both have similarities like traffic routing, circuit breaking to protect applications and rate limit, and both get track of the data collected to see what is going on at individual request level (so monitoring is also included in somehow). Dong both also Load Balancing is one of another way. That my understanding suggest me is that Service Mesh are more for network observability and securing the internal interactions betweeen services, and API gateway could be sit in a more high level perspective, by receiving Client requests and doing all that the video specify. Not sure if that is correct. I am wondering if a Servie Mesh can behave in somehow as an API Gateway, perhaps yes, depending on the capabilities we need to work with, but cloud providers api gateway are definitively a plus like HA across regions and seamless integrations with other services they talk to like K8s or whatever. Curious about hearing your thoughts about this appreciation. Thanks for the time spent on sharing all this valuable information. :)

[@hemanthaugust7217]

u can think of API Gateway as anything on the Server network that's going to first receive the request and does all types of processing, except handling a business use-case and eventually handing off the modified request to business/domain service.

[@hiteshklalwani]

To avoid single point of failure in API Gateway, as you mentioned it should be geographically deployed. But within same data center, should a load balancer be placed before API gateway? Or there should be failover API gateway as it already does load balancing?

[@mshohag4229]

which software do you use to create this animation video?

[@anatoliistepaniuk8217]

What software can be used to create animations such as those in the video?

[@ayumi5621]

204k subs in 4 months with non-pop cultural content. Congratulations you are soon a millionaire. Great content!

[@SREEDHARNIRVANA]

I love content

[@DarkGT]

The images were hard to read. Do you mind making the graphics a little bit larger next time? Thanks for your videos.

[@sadashivshinde9150]

What is the function of API Gateway in monolith. And second doubt I have is a lot of things you mentioned can also achieved by middlewares so how does all this fit in.

[@ADITYAKUMARking]

Is it similar to load balancer?

[@lotannanwose9387]

Hi Alex, do you have one for Webhook Gateways?

[@m.warisali]

How is it different from Applications routing system or NGINX? Like in Rails, dJango, we can define routes and do almost all of the things described in the video. I think API Gateway is just managed service but deployed on multiple regions/edge locations.

[@techcraftzone]

There are lots of other thing done by API gateway rather a load balancer or request router. Main purpose it to manage API lifecycle where, developer can start with API first development and share it among other developers. You can do API publishing, subscribing, deprecating, versioning APIs with an API gateway. Other than those, you can throttle, certificate validation, authentication, authorisation on API gateway.

[@swatimalla]

I have one question here ..do you recommend any library or any spring based library to implement this ..?I am looking for some hello world example in github which does all this ..?Its really a great great demo and i want to use it but no idea where to start ..i am looking for some example version in java i can use ..i highly appreciate if you can give some examples …

[@aidataverse]

What tool do you use to Design?

[@SumitGupta2022]

In a typical web application, Is the client sending the request to API GW a web client or web server? Meaning that users are using the web application and it’s the web app which is hosted on a web server calling the API GW, right?

[@rafaelacioly3252]

Do I need cache on my application (using Redis for example) if I'm using an API Gateway? You said that the API gateway also provides caching...

[@patchfox]

Yes, you don`t need an additional cache service on the api layer with most of the existing api gateway solutions. But for other layers it could still make sense to have a cache too like webapps etc.

[@cyberhard]

I'm curious as to why allow/deny isn't the first step? Why validate parameters for a "client" that isn't allowed in the first place?

[@willinton06]

The deny could be revoked for specific users, can’t know if you don’t validate first

[@DanielDogeanu]

I was thinking about this as well. It seems like a waste of resources.

[@DanielDogeanu]

@@willinton06 You can get the request's IP first, and check the allow/deny list. No need to read the payload before.

[@willinton06]

@@DanielDogeanu the IP is often not enough, you should not ban an entire network for a single misbehaving user, specially if the offense wasn’t serious

[@themichaelw]

2:17 isn't gRPC simply an implementation framework of RPC? The protocol could be something like protobuf, flatbuffers, cap'n proto, etc.

[@gyanadave2538]

Why rate limiting check after authentication?

[@parasarkodati9804]

i dont think the response animation in red at 2:23 should go through all the services in the gateway... after protocol conversion it can be routed to the client

[@mulshiwaters5312]

Please share link for API Authentication with JWT token or Token based authentication as its is very complex to understand when it comes to enable API Authentication with existing Identity Provider for specific application

[@VuinhThanh-ol8fx]

what tool u use to make this animation?

[@ucNguyen-lk8tx]

So can I consider Nginx as an API Gateway?

[@microtech2448]

How we can create api gateway on our own, specifically with . Net core? If we don't wanna use other cloud provider's api gateways?

[@Homeybadgers]

Thank you, how is API gateway similar or different than reverse proxy?

[@anbarasu1997]

API Gateway is used to Hide the server details. Reverse proxy is used to hide the client details

[@tryptich7347]

​@@anbarasu1997Isn't it a forward proxy that hides client details?

[@Charles-rn3ke]

Will we still need a load balancer if we have an API gateway?

[@popo-kx2bn]

may i know how to make this type of vedio

[@mqtt07]

do microservices use API Gateway to communicate with each other?

[@martinabeita8852]

It will increase latency ... So isn't there any alternatives?

[@remyd8767]

In your opinion what are best api gateways in the market?

[@parp2323]

What are the differences and similarities compared to a reverse proxy? Seems like they have a lot in common

[@thisisneeraj7133]

Actual use case differs since in RP we are just using it as a mask for our server in order to sanitise the requests or anonymizing the underlying layer of architectural server components, but in api gtwy we do need it everytime and there's theoretically no difference if you've ever worked on em

[@abdisalam679]

how to make and edit like that

[@izenhow4775]

Next video => Domain specific language, nullability, complier

[@cristianouzumaki2455]

I can bet no one can lay out an API gateway like this for you in such a short time.

[@spyros5528]

Liked the content, good explanation. However, the constant slow zoom is really disorienting to watch for people that can't handle that type of motion. It's an accessibility thing.