Is Postman an API Gateway?

What is an API gateway example?

An API gateway is a software layer that processes the traffic of a backend system.

You can also define micro-services as parts of the backends. So a service that is available for REST is an API gateway. But API gateways were not just used to process the traffic of the backends. They have many interesting features and are often a part of a Service Bus or Event Grid. The concept of an API gateway was made famous by the famous Amazon web service API Gateway. Today it's the common approach to create RESTful services while micro-services often use their own ways of communication and service discovery, so there are many vendors to implement a complete integration platform for them, such as Kafka or Kogito and other middleware that provide different ways to communicate between micro-services.

Why are there multiple vendors? I had a conversation with a couple of vendors about the concept of the API gateway. Many companies offer this product, but they're not using one standard protocol. Why do we have multiple vendors? Is it only due to the lack of interest in making a standard? I think no. It's rather easy to make an API gateway or to solve the problem that someone has. To make them an API gateway is more or less a definition of certain problems the software must solve. And if you know what you want to achieve. Some vendors have chosen a completely different approach. One vendor might be offering a gateway which exposes the whole service. You can find all services and all their endpoints in an accessible place. You don't need to search what you want and what's possible. Another service might implement a smaller gateway within its own infrastructure. For this it might not expose all services as an API. Only a few things are accessible and some services have their own service discovery inside. Other vendors might use an integration broker as a middleware between your code and their platform. But even these two ways are very limited compared to some products that offer a different approach. And I think there will be many trends within next years for developing integrations platforms. I would like to list here some vendors and their way to approach integrations in this text:

One vendor may offer a full stack - this means that it implements an API gateway plus a way to discover services. As mentioned before, with other vendors the discovery is done either with their own middleware or with an integration broker or API gateway.

Is Postman an API Gateway?

I'm new to Node.

Js, and I'm currently using it to create an API Gateway for my application.

I want to use a Postman like tool to test my API, but I'm a little confused. Are Postman and other similar tools called "API Gateways"? Or are they just UI's for testing APIs? I'm just getting started with the API Gateway, so I don't really understand the term "API Gateway". Thanks for your help! Postman is not an API gateway but you can make it behave as one by using a proxy. An API gateway basically is a server that sits in front of an API. It handles requests from clients and routes them to the appropriate API. It handles authentication (as well as rate limiting) and authorization of API clients.

API gateways are usually written in Java or PHP. It's possible to write an API gateway in Node.js as well, but your best bet would be to use a ready-made API gateway like Nodejitsu's API Gateway service.

What is API portal vs API Gateway?

As per terminology, we can say that API Gateway is the server that hosts the APIs, and API portal is the user interface that allows an external client to access these APIs.

What if you will not be giving access to your API from any external client? Would it still make sense to build this API gateway server in API portal? It does.

Let us understand this by providing a real world example. When we want to host internal API for a company, we can either create a separate server for that, or use the internal infrastructure. The latter option seems to be a better approach because we don't need to maintain the server with the API, and there are no problems if the server gets hacked or attacked.

This concept of having an independent server for APIs makes more sense than having them within the main infrastructure. There is no difference if an external client is allowed to call an API from the portal or if an API is hosted in separate server in your infrastructure. The only difference is that if there are multiple calls from the same IP, then the server has to handle that call individually and that will add some overhead as compared to having a single server handling multiple requests at a time. So, if you are planning to do that, there would better to have a separate server for that.

API gateway server vs API portal. There is a lot of confusion among developers about whether to host APIs in API portal or API gateway. A developer who uses API portal will never get clarity, and they will be wondering what is this all about. This is what I am writing this blog to clear this concept and provide some insights.

In simple terms, API gateway server helps other applications to call the APIs. An API client can have one of two types: Authorized Clients- Applications can call an API after the authentication of the identity of the user. For that, a token is generated and it must be included in the request body.

UnAuthorized Clients- The unauthorised clients are applications that can call the API without any authentication. An application that has an unauthorised access can call the API which is secured by a firewall.

How to expose API? If we take our own example, we will have a few different applications in our system. We will have an app that can call our admin console portal.