API Gateway

Introduction

An API gateway is an intermediate layer between the client and the server that acts as a reverse proxy and routes client requests to individual services. Catalyst provides API Gateway as an advanced API management tool that enables you to create, maintain, and monitor HTTP requests generated from client applications and microservices.

Catalyst API Gateway acts as a single entryway into accessing the following target components of your Catalyst application:

• Basic I/O Functions
• Advanced I/O Functions
• Web Client

Once you enable API Gateway for your Catalyst project in the Catalyst web console, all client requests to access these targets will be handled by this gateway. This helps prevent these components from being directly exposed to the clients by decoupling the clients from services.

You can create customized individual APIs for every request type to access these targets. The API Gateway handles these functionalities of an API call and processes the request accordingly:

• Routing
• Authentication (optional)
• Throttling (optional)

Catalyst provides API Gateway as an optional, paid component, and as an enhancement to Security Rules. While Security Rules provides basic routing and authentication features for your functions, API Gateway provides more flexibility in customizing the functionalities mentioned above for your APIs. You can learn more from the Security Rules vs API Gateway section.

You can also work with API Gateway from the Catalyst CLI. You can enable or disable it, and check its status. You can learn about this from the Working with API Gateway CLI help page. You can also pull the JSON file that contains the definitions of the APIs you create in your remote console to your local environment, and work on it locally. You can then deploy it to the remote console.