IMPROVING API ARCHITECTURE

Open the door to better API management.

api gateway architecture

The power of HAProxy is the perfect match for a gateway into your API architecture. Scalable, secure, and always lightning fast.

Key Principles

api application programing interfaces icon

Application programming interfaces (APIs) form the backbone of today’s web. Whether they’re consumed by web pages, mobile apps, or remote IoT devices, APIs grant access to your business logic and data.

After 20 years as the world’s fastest software load balancer, our solutions are the ideal choice for a gateway into these modern systems.

API Gateways manage and scale the number of clients an API can support, while requiring security, observability, and high-performance load balancing. Products like HAProxy Enterprise and HAProxy Enterprise Kubernetes Ingress Controller are the perfect choice for API Gateways. Deployable in the cloud, on-premises, or as part of a Kubernetes infrastructure.

What is an API Gateway?

An API Gateway is installed on a server in front of your APIs. Clients connect to the gateway, which presents services at a single IP address. Routing determines which API service to forward a client’s request to.

api gateway diagram

Learn how to embed a WAF into your system with HAProxy Technologies

API GATEWAY PLAYBOOK

The Demands of An API System

Building a gateway into these modern networks requires a sophisticated load balancing solution that can stand up to the rigors of a microservices architecture. Here are some examples that show how HAProxy Technologies’ suite of products are the right tool for the task.

Flexible Load Balancing

SOLUTIONS:

  • Powerful balancing algorithms

  • Advanced Health Checks

Optimize the performance and reliability of your APIs by distributing requests evenly across a pool of servers. With HAProxy Enterprise, you can choose the load balancing algorithm that’s best suited for your type of service, including round robinfewest connections, and consistent hash.

The systematic and detailed health checks offered by the HAProxy Technologies’ suite of products continually monitor your servers for downtime and errors, and will ensure that failed servers are detected swiftly so that clients can be routed to healthy endpoints.

Customizable Routing

SOLUTIONS:

  • Flexible Client Routing

  • Logical Operator Support

An API gateway requires complex routing capabilities, and it is here that the HAProxy suite of products stand out. With a powerful syntax for defining routes, companies can consolidate many APIs behind a single address, simplifying discovery and use of their data. This also enables easy maintenance, meaning simplified API updates.

Using HAProxy Enterprise as an entrypoint to your APIs also means you can define pools of servers and relay clients through to them with the broad range of routing options available, whether by URL, domain name, geolocation, device type, or source IP address. With support for logical operators, you can also combine rules in a variety of ways.

Better Security

SOLUTIONS:

  • ​​Customizable Logging

  • Connection Pooling

  • HTTP Compression

  • Response Caching

Placing API servers behind an HAProxy Enterprise load balancer narrows the attack surface available to hackers. With all traffic flowing through a single entrypoint, you can enforce rate limitsdeflect bad bots, block attacks with the web application firewall, and enable token-based access control.

Choose different response policies to deter unwanted clients including blocking, silently dropping, tarpitting, shadowbanning, or displaying a reCAPTCHA. Your HAProxy Enterprise load balancer can also take care of certificate management, with high-performance SSL/TLS enabling secure communication.

Observable and Accelerated APIs

SOLUTIONS:

  • ​​Global Server Load Balancing

  • Advanced DNS Server Capability

  • Edge ADN

HAProxy Enterprise collects over 100 metrics that help you stay ahead of trouble, meaning unrivaled observability over your system. Stream that data to Prometheus, InfluxDB or another time-series database to see long-term trends. Customizable logs also provide insight into every step of a client’s session.

In addition, by offloading work to an HAProxy Enterprise load balancer, you can greatly increase server performance. With features like advanced HTTP compression to shrink server responses, connection pooling for efficient use of idle connections, and response caching to lower server load. Fine-grained tuning options let you optimize for your type of traffic.

FREE EBOOK

Download the eBook: HAProxy as an API Gateway

HAProxy as an API Gateway

With the help of this eBook, you will learn how to utilize HAProxy as an API Gateway. Including the skills necessary to route and load balance HTTP traffic, cache API responses, enable health checking of backend services, authenticate users, and much more.

Contact the authoritative experts on HAProxy who will assist you in finding the solution that best fits your needs for deployment, scale, and security.

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