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API gateways

API gateways serve as intermediaries for managing interactions between clients and backend services, optimizing performance and security.

Description

In the context of Non-Human Identities (NHIs), API gateways play a crucial role in facilitating secure and efficient communication between various applications, services, and automated entities that do not require human intervention. NHIs often represent software agents, bots, or IoT devices that need to interact with APIs to perform functions autonomously. API gateways provide a single entry point for these entities, allowing them to access multiple backend services while enforcing security policies, rate limiting, and authentication mechanisms. They can also handle load balancing, caching, and logging, which improve the overall performance and reliability of the system. By abstracting the complexities of interacting with different services, API gateways simplify the integration process for NHIs, enabling them to operate more effectively in distributed environments. This is particularly important in microservices architectures, where numerous services need to communicate seamlessly without direct exposure to each other, enhancing both security and scalability.

Examples

  • Amazon API Gateway
  • Kong API Gateway

Additional Information

  • API gateways can also provide analytics and monitoring features to track usage patterns of NHIs.
  • They help enforce governance and compliance policies by managing access controls for automated entities.

References