API Gateway Patterns
Every client-facing microservice fleet needs a single front door. This video catalogues what that door does — request routing, authentication, rate limiting, response transformation, and the aggregation of multiple backend calls into one client round trip — and where each responsibility belongs, so the gateway stays a pass-through instead of becoming a second monolith.
Topics covered:
- The gateway as the single entry point: routing requests to services by path
- Cross-cutting concerns: auth, TLS termination, and header injection in one place
- Rate limiting and quotas: token buckets and per-client enforcement at the edge
- Request aggregation: collapsing N backend calls into one client response
- Protocol translation: HTTP, gRPC, and WebSocket at one door
- BFFs: why per-client gateways beat one universal gateway
- Gateway failure modes: a hop that needs timeouts and holds no state
- When to skip it: small systems and service-to-service traffic
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