Overview

API Gateway provides API lifecycle management services, including API publishing, management, maintenance, and monetization. It enables simple and fast microservice integration, front and back end separation, and system integration at low costs and low risks. You can use API Gateway to share functions and data with your partners and third-party developers.

Benefits

• Easy Maintenance Provides API documentation, SDKs, and API version management to reduce the daily maintenance costs.
• Pay-As-You-Go API Gateway activation and API management are free of charge. You only need to pay for APIs that you have called.
• Auto Scaling and High Performance API Gateway supports distributed deployment and auto scaling to respond to large numbers of requests with low latency.
• Security and Stability API Gateway supports permission management, traffic throttling, monitoring, and alarms. You can allow API Gateway to access your services in the intranet without causing any security issues.

Features

Easy API Management

Provides easy-to-use API management tools and functions.

• API Lifecycle Management Supports API lifecycle management, including API definition, testing, and publishing. API Gateway is an easy-to-use service for daily API and version management. It also supports hot upgrade and quick rollback.
• Easy-to-Use Tools and Documentation Provides visualized debugging tools and automatically generates API documentation and SDKs to reduce labor costs.

Security and Stability

Provides permission management, traffic throttling, monitoring, and alarms.

• Security API requests must pass the identity and permission authentication process to pass through an API gateway and reach backend services. Supports HMAC-SHA1 and HMAC-SHA256 signatures and SSL encryption.
• Traffic Throttling Throttles the maximum number of API calls that can be made in one minute, one hour, or one day. This feature protects backend services for enterprises and enables business and user prioritization. Supports traffic throttling based on the priority of APIs to ensure that your business is running stably. Supports traffic throttling based on the priority of users or applications to guarantee the service uptime for important users. You can also use a circuit breaker to handle backend service failures. You can throttle the maximum number of API calls that can be made in one minute, one hour, or one day.

Request Management

Filters out invalid requests through parameter validation. Parameter conversion allows you to use one API to use multiple services.

• Parameter Validation API Gateway validates parameter types and values to reduce the resource consumption and overhead for handling invalid requests in the back end. The validation methods include the value range validation, enumeration, regular expressions, and JSON Schema.
• Parameter Conversion API Gateway allows you to create parameter mapping rules to transform backend services to the forms required by different users. This feature enables services to share functions and helps you avoid developing the same function for each service.

Monitoring and Alarms

Integrates with CloudMonitor to provide monitoring and alarms. Improvements are still being made to this feature.

• Monitoring and Alarms Supports real-time and visualized API monitoring, which allows you to monitor API calls, calling methods, response time, and error rates. This feature enables you to learn the API running status and user behavior. Allows you to customize alarm rules to generate alarms when an exception occurs and save time troubleshooting. In later updates, you will be able to subscribe to data analysis reports and intelligent analysis.

API Market

Provides an all-in-one solution for API management and monetization.

• API Market APIs managed by API Gateway can be published to Alibaba Cloud API Market as services. API Gateway and the API Market provide the metering, billing, quota control, operations, and monetization features of APIs.