Google has announced the public beta of API Gateway, a fully-managed Google Cloud service to create and monitor APIs for serverless workloads, at the recent Google’s Cloud Next virtual conference.
API Gateway builds on Compute Engine, GKE, App Engine, and serverless backends such as Cloud Run & Cloud Functions without the requirement to write codes for multiple endpoints or managing the infrastructure’s scaling. It provides a way of consuming services via APIs, hiding the complexity of the backends.
Clients can consume the REST APIs for implementing standalone applications for a mobile device or browser or can create any other application that can make a request to an HTTP endpoint.
Built on Envoy, a cloud-native high-performance edge/middle/service proxy, the managed service provides features such as rate limiting, authentication and key validation to manage and secure the APIs.
Fabian Seitz, technical product manager at MediaMarktSaturn, while commenting on the benefits of the new managed services said we had challenges with scaling and consolidation of different API call types prior to implementing the API Gateway. Seitz added not only have we resolved issues, but we’ve experienced a 10x improvement in API management by using a single platform that is easily accessible through the cloud console and fully managed by Google Cloud.
A detailed tutorial on how to create a first API endpoint using Cloud Function, Cloud Run, App Engine Standard and API Gateway to control the requests can be accessed here. Vikram Shinde, cloud architect at Mastek UK, highlighted the advantages of the new services by saying it is easy to develop and manage APIs compared to Cloud Endpoints (ESPV1 and ESPV2) with the API Gateway. Shinde added API Gateway can be created using Cloud Console so there is less complexity involved to create/modify configurations.
