patterntypescriptMajor
API Gateway Routing: Centralize cross-cutting concerns at the gateway layer
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api-gatewaykongtraefikroutingauthrate-limitingmicroservices
Problem
In microservice architectures, every service must independently implement auth, rate limiting, CORS, logging, and request routing. This duplicates infrastructure code and creates inconsistency across services.
Solution
Route all traffic through an API gateway (Kong, AWS API Gateway, Traefik, Caddy). Implement cross-cutting concerns once at the gateway: authentication verification, rate limiting, TLS termination, request/response logging, and routing. Services receive pre-authenticated, pre-validated requests.
Why
Centralizing infrastructure concerns reduces the surface area for misconfiguration. Services can focus on business logic. Gateway-level observability provides a single view of all API traffic.
Gotchas
- The gateway becomes a single point of failure — ensure it is highly available and well-monitored.
- Do not implement business logic at the gateway — it should be transparent to request content.
- Gateway-level auth verification still requires services to authorize actions — authentication (who are you) is not authorization (what can you do).
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