Analysis of API Gateway Selection of Several Major Cloud Vendors

1. What is an API Gateway?

An API Gateway is a way to decouple the client interface from the backend implementation. When a client makes a request, the API Gateway breaks it down into multiple requests, routes them to the right places, generates responses, and keeps track of everything.

An e-commerce site might use an API Gateway to provide an endpoint for mobile clients to retrieve all product details with a single request. It calls various services, such as product information and reviews, and combines the results.

2. API Gateway Function

An API gateway typically handles common tasks used across API serving systems, such as user authentication, rate limiting, and statistics.

The most basic function of an API service is to accept remote requests and return responses. However, the reality is not that simple. We can imagine some issues that need to be considered when hosting an API.

• Authentication services and rate limiting are options that you choose when you want to protect your API from overuse and abuse.
• Wanting to understand how callers are using the API, profiling and monitoring tools were added.
• How to connect to the billing system when billing.
• If the service adopts a microservice architecture, a single request may need to call multiple different applications.

Faced with these problems, the challenge for API gateways is to provide a simple and reliable experience for callers.

An API Gateway is a part of an API management system. The API Gateway intercepts all incoming requests and sends them out through the API management system.

The work of an API gateway varies from implementation to implementation. Some common functions include: authentication, protocol conversion, routing, rate limiting, circuit breaking, isolation, caching, billing, logging, monitoring, analytics, policies, alerting, and security.

3. API Gateway Comparison

There are many commercial API gateway vendors. Here we only select three vendors with relatively strong comprehensive strength in the field of cloud computing for research and comparison, namely, Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud API gateways. Open source API gateways are not considered here.

1. Function comparison

2. Fees and Usage Restrictions

Because shared instances are not suitable for use as API gateways in production environments, the comparison data all uses dedicated instance data.

4. API Gateway Selection Analysis

1. Functional comparison analysis

As for the functions required by API gateway, all manufacturers basically have them, and the differences are not big. Relatively speaking, the differences are relatively large in the following aspects, as shown in the table:

2. API Gateway Selection Analysis

Regarding the selection of an API gateway, if your current main business is already on several cloud vendors and the scale of usage is relatively concentrated, then it is more appropriate to choose a cloud vendor based on your current business. After all, supporting services can make related applications easier to use.

If the above factors are not taken into consideration, then you can consider the following suggestions:

Corresponding to the API gateway related data of several cloud vendors, for those with mandatory fee requirements, you can compare the paid versions and usage restrictions to choose the appropriate vendor and paid version;

If there are a large number of files or log data that need to be uploaded via the API, it is recommended to use the Tencent Cloud API, after all, the advantage of the 10G limit is simply unparalleled;

If you have high requirements for document support or mobile development, Alibaba Cloud has a greater advantage.

If you want more powerful monitoring related to API usage, Alibaba Cloud's monitoring and link tracking are more prominent;

If you don’t have any of the above issues to consider, or if you are also considering IaaS, here is a list of the market proportions of cloud infrastructure in mainland China in 2021 for your reference: