API Gateway Checklist: How Strong Is Your API’s Front Door?

Every API needs a front door. A welcoming threshold for the handshakes of requests and responses. A solid construction that won’t fall apart with all the traffic. And wouldn’t a screen door be nice to keep out the mosquitos — I mean, threat actors and would-be DDoS attacks? Maybe even some niceties that make the whole experience a little more enjoyable?

Enter the API gateway, your API’s front door and so much more, including orchestrating traffic, enforcing security and optimizing performance. But as with all big infrastructure decisions, knowing where to start is hard — or if you’re already down the path of shipping a new API, knowing whether you’re on the right track.

Inspired by our friends at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and their Cloud Native Maturity Model for identifying where an organization stands in its cloud native journey, I wondered: Could I help you take a step back and give your API’s front door an honest assessment? And could I help you see what renovations might be in order next?

Build: Lay the Foundation

In the frame of API gateways, you’re currently in your minimum viable product (MVP) or preproduction phase, validating tools and figuring out the breakdown of responsibilities as you push toward go-live.

• Decide on the fundamentals of your API gateway infrastructure, such as a cloud-hosted or on-premises solution, and whether you will use a standalone agent, embed API gateway behavior into your API with an SDK, or leverage Kubernetes-native features like the Gateway API.
• Implement security fundamentals, starting with basic auth for initial testing and progress to JSON Web Tokens (JWTs).
• Set up rate limiting to test your abuse prevention, and configure IP restrictions as needed for extra protection.
• Implement load balancing to distribute traffic evenly and explore your options for DDoS protection.
• Explore the opportunities within your API gateway to conditionally act on incoming and outgoing traffic.
• Write up your fundamental API governance policies, even if you don’t have the technical setup or in-house talent to implement them.

As you build, be sure to constantly take note of how each of these decisions and implementations affect your development life cycle. Can API developers still build freely? Do DevOps, infrastructure and platform engineers have the right tools to manage this platform on their behalf?

As you complete these steps, you’ll have a functional API gateway that gets the job done — proxies requests to various routes or microservices — and has just enough fundamental protections to help you brave the public internet.

Operate: Move to Production

Time to move your MVP from testing and onto your production infrastructure, where you’re concerned with integration, efficiency and preparing for the challenges of a live environment.

• Integrate your API gateway configuration and deployment into your CI/CD pipelines for integration testing of security or governance rules.
• Store and manage all API-related configurations as code for version control, code review, quality assurance and repeatability.
• Begin testing your API gateway with multiregion, multicloud and private cloud deployments to prepare for future expansion.
• Move your security, testing and operational tasks around API gateways earlier in the development cycle and give API developers more control.
• Write comprehensive documentation for how you deploy and operate your API.

Whether you’re in the middle of this phase or already past it, you’ll notice your API gateway paying big dividends by managing production-grade load automatically, and letting you fine-tune behavior, through rules and actions, based on early observability data. If you don’t feel that way, it might be time to reassess.

Scale: Prepare for Growth

All of a sudden, your API gateway has become more than a path of ingress from the public internet to your upstream API service. It’s now your go-to tool for orchestrating a complex ecosystem of services, regions, users and volume — lots of volume.

• Leverage what you learned about multiregion and multicloud deployments to improve your performance and redundancy.
• Build or adopt (and test!) automated failover for your API gateway and API service in case any part of your infrastructure falls off the internet map, whether it’s one instance of your API service or your API gateway provider.
• Gather more observability data to make trends in traffic, errors, requests and responses actionable.
• Develop and enforce advanced traffic policies, such as nuanced rate limiting or fine-grained access control, based on real-world usage.
• Implement version and deprecation processes.

Next up? Your API gateway becomes not just a tool, but the centerpiece of how your teams deploy with more strategy, agility and speed.

Improve: Enhance Security and Governance Policy

This phase is all about refining. Your API gateway is adaptable and scalable, but to keep growing the business around it, you’ll need to implement more strict controls while not impeding developers with a hundred hoops to jump through just to push a change from v1.10.34 to v1.10.35. It’s a difficult balancing act, but essential to get right.

• Adopt tools and workflows that enable DevOps and infrastructure engineers to maintain centralized control of your API gateway security while allowing developers to work efficiently. A good example is the Kubernetes Gateway API, which defines its configuration models on common roles, such as infrastructure providers, cluster operators and application developers.
• Analyze and optimize costs for your entire API infrastructure.
• Implement real-time monitoring to enable and enforce service-level agreements (SLAs) with your biggest API consumers.
• Give developers self-service development environments to test complex scenarios or major changes to your API or gateway.
• Streamline tooling and vendors around your API gateway.
• Investigate continuous deployment practices, such as GitOps, for both your API service and API gateway.

You’re nearly there — but there’s also a long way to go.

Adapt: Revisit, Rebuild and Reinvent

At this point, you’re not just reacting to what’s happening on your API gateway right now, but also proactively evolving your strategy to stay ahead of the game. You’re continuously improving based on rich observability data, but there is still more to do.

• Centralize your quality engineering through API gateway testing suites to prevent defects and minimize incidents.
• Transition all API releases and API gateway configuration changes to a GitOps workflow.
• Enable developers to use sophisticated deployment techniques, like blue/green or canary deployments via the API gateway.
• Provide API developers with tools and training to implement and test advanced security features from the earliest stages of development.
• Create a self-service environment where developers can provision, configure and manage API gateways within established guardrails.

If you’ve checked everything off on this list, congratulations! And best of luck, because now your path toward API excellence could go off in about a million new challenging (maybe even fun?) directions. Think predictive analytics, adaptive rate limiting with AI, automated compliance reports and beyond.

Time To Identify Your Next Renovation

Your API’s front door is too important to neglect — and too rich with potential to not go all-in on leveling up your maturity from one phase to the next.

As you assess and scope your next change, remember that API gateway maturity isn’t a linear path. There are no right solutions, only solutions that work for your team and API. Pick one or two items that could benefit from your team’s focus, then constantly reassess as you check items off. You might have incidentally spruced up a few other parts of your API gateway along the way.

If you’re just starting out into API gateways, or are tired of your current implementation and want to start a greenfield project off on the right foot, ngrok’s API gateway is designed to help you quickly check off items across this checklist with the flexibility you’ll need to adapt along the way.

We’d be happy to welcome you in: Start by signing up for a free account, which gives you access to all our API gateway-specific features. From there, learn more about the ngrok API gateway on our blog or in the Traffic Policy docs, where you’ll find all the actions, variables and macros you’ll need to strengthen that front door again and again.