4

Say you are using Microservices with Docker Containers and Kubernetes.

If you use an API Gateway (e.g. Azure API Gateway) in front of your microservices to handle composite UI and authentication, do you still need a Service Mesh to handle Service Discovery and Circuit Breaker? Is there any functionality in Azure API Gateway to handle these kind of challenges? How?

Ralph Willgoss
  • 11,750
  • 4
  • 64
  • 67
user217648
  • 3,338
  • 9
  • 37
  • 61

4 Answers4

9

API gateways are applied on Layer 7 of OSI model or you can say to manage traffic coming from outside network ( sometimes also called north/south traffic ) , whereas Service Mesh is applied to Layer 4 of OSI model or to manager inter-services communications ( sometimes also called as east/west traffic). Some examples of API Gateway features are Reverse Proxy,Load Balancing , Authentication and Authorization , IP Listing , Rate-Limiting etc. 

Service Mesh, on the other hand, works like a proxy or a side-car pattern which de-couples the communication responsibility of the service and handles other concerns such as Circuit breaker , timeouts , retries , service-discovery etc.

If you happen to use Kubernetes and Microservices then you might want to explore other solutions such as Ambassador + Istio Or Kong which works as Gateway as well as Service Mesh.

fatcook
  • 946
  • 4
  • 16
  • 1
    thanks, fatcook. We are going to use Azure API Management as API Gateway and AKS with Istio to handle Circuit breaker and Service Discovery. – user217648 Apr 09 '19 at 11:20
5

An API Gateway only handles the entry point into your Kubernetes clusters, e.g. it sends a request to your frontend microservice. However, it can do nothing after the request enters your cluster. There might still be multiple calls between microservices. You still want to verify authentication for those requests, you still want to make sure that there are circuit breakers in between the services, etc. Theoretically, you could make sure all your microservices call each other via the API gateway, however I do not think that is what you want.

In short: No, because an API Gateway is only an entry point, any service to service communication is better handled with a Service Mesh.

Blokje5
  • 4,763
  • 1
  • 20
  • 37
  • Thank you Blokje5, before I accept your answer, I need to make myself sure, Why must of API Gateway vendors say that you even can use the API Gateway for Service Discovery and Circuit Breaker etc? – user217648 Apr 06 '19 at 15:15
2

you can use an API gateway to handle service discovery and circuit breaker - but that would make it a central point in your deployment i.e. all calls external and internal will have to be routed via the gateway.

A service mesh deploy an additional edge component ("sidecar") alongside each service making the overall behavior distributed (but also more complex)

Depending on your particular requirements you may use one, the other, both or none

Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz
  • 25,469
  • 3
  • 45
  • 68
0

Nicely explained by fatcook above.. See Azure-Frontdoor

as this is attempting to do the same as Kong on Azure. API gateway + handling control plane level features

Samant
  • 92
  • 1
  • 3
  • 13