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Architecture & Engineering

API Gateway

An API gateway is a single entry point that sits in front of backend services and handles concerns common to all of them — authentication, rate limiting, routing, request validation and logging. Clients call the gateway rather than the services directly, so those services do not each reimplement the same cross-cutting logic.

The value is consolidation. Without a gateway, every service needs its own authentication check, its own rate limiter and its own logging format, and they inevitably drift apart. Centralising those concerns means one place to change a policy and one consistent implementation to audit.

The corresponding risk is that a gateway is a single point of failure and, if allowed, a place where business logic accumulates. A gateway that starts transforming payloads and making routing decisions based on domain rules becomes a distributed monolith's worst component — shared by everyone, owned by no one. Keep it to cross-cutting concerns.

Codazz builds this in production — API & Backend Development.

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API Gateway
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Usually not. A monolith already has one entry point, so a gateway adds a hop without consolidating anything. It becomes worthwhile when you have several backend services, multiple client types needing different shapes of the same data, or a policy such as rate limiting that must apply uniformly across services.