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An API gateway provides more features including rate limiting, security, and API monitoring. What this means to us in the API world, is that when you're using an API proxy, your API had better already exist. An API proxy provides a new endpoint for an existing API, but it can't do everything an API gateway can do.
An API gateway sits between clients and services. It acts as a reverse proxy, routing requests from clients to services. It may also perform various cross-cutting tasks such as authentication, SSL termination, and rate limiting.
As the leading high‑performance, lightweight reverse proxy and load balancer, NGINX has the advanced HTTP processing capabilities needed for handling API traffic. This makes NGINX the ideal platform with which to build an API gateway.
API gateways: enterprises can use the two together, but one doesn't require the other. As an example, an API gateway connects microservices, while load balancers redirect multiple instances of the same microservice components as they scale out.
It is easier to think about them if you realize they aren't mutually exclusive. Think of an API gateway as a specific type reverse proxy implementation.
In regards to your questions, it is not uncommon to see the both used in conjunction where the API gateway is treated as an application tier that sits behind a reverse proxy for load balancing and health checking. An example would be something like a WAF sandwich architecture in that your Web Application Firewall/API Gateway is sandwiched by reverse proxy tiers, one for the WAF itself and the other for the individual microservices it talks to.
Regarding the differences, they are very similar. It's just nomenclature. As you take a basic reverse proxy setup and start bolting on more pieces like authentication, rate limiting, dynamic config updates, and service discovery, people are more likely to call that an API gateway.
I believe, API Gateway is a reverse proxy that can be configured dynamically via API and potentially via UI, while traditional reverse proxy (like Nginx, HAProxy or Apache) is configured via config file and has to be restarted when configuration changes. Thus, API Gateway should be used when routing rules or other configuration often changes. To your questions:
Additionally, API Gateway is often provided in form of SAAS, like Apigee or Tyk for example.
Also, here's my tutorial on how to create a simple API Gateway with Node.js https://memz.co/api-gateway-microservices-docker-node-js/
Hope it helps.
API gateway acts as a reverse proxy to accept all application programming interface (API) calls, aggregate the various services required to fulfill them, and return the appropriate result.
An API gateway has a more robust set of features — especially around security and monitoring — than an API proxy. I would say API gateway pattern also called as Backend for frontend (BFF) is widely used in Microservices development. Checkout the article for the benefits and features of API Gateway pattern in Microservice world.
On the other hand API proxy is basically a lightweight API gateway. It includes some basic security and monitoring capabilities. So, if you already have an API and your needs are simple, an API proxy will work fine.
The below image will provide you the clear picture of the difference between API Gateway and Reverse proxy.
API Gateways usually operate as a L7 construct.
API Gateways provide additional functionality as compared to a plain reverse proxy. If you consider some of the portals out there they can provide :
However with the advent of service meshes like Istio, Consul a lot of the functionality of API Gateways will be subsumed by meshes.
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