API Gateway Design Patterns
Introduction
When Netflix transitioned to microservices, they faced a brutal reality: clients were making 50+ direct service calls to render a single homepage. Mobile apps were draining batteries with redundant authentication checks. The solution wasn’t just adding a proxy—it was rethinking the entire client-service contract through intelligent API Gateway patterns.
Why Gateway Patterns Matter
An API Gateway isn’t just a reverse proxy with routing rules. It’s a strategic aggregation layer that prevents your microservices architecture from leaking into client applications. Without proper gateway patterns, you’re forcing mobile apps to understand service discovery, implement circuit breakers, and handle partial failures—complexity that belongs on the backend.
The difference between a basic gateway and a production-grade one becomes clear at scale. Amazon’s API Gateway processes billions of requests daily, and their patterns reveal insights most engineers miss: request coalescing reduces backend load by 60%, response caching cuts latency by 80% for read-heavy workloads, and intelligent routing enables zero-downtime deployments.
