Architecture Pattern
API Gateway / Backend-for-Frontend
A single entry point that sits in front of your backend services, handling routing, auth, and request shaping for client applications.
What it is
Rather than a frontend calling multiple backend services directly, an API gateway (or a backend-for-frontend tailored to a specific client type) sits in front, handling authentication, rate limiting, and combining/reshaping responses so the frontend gets exactly what it needs in one call.
When to use it
When you have multiple backend services and one or more client applications (web, mobile) that would otherwise need to know about and call each service directly.
Real tradeoffs
- —Adds a layer that must stay reliable — if the gateway is down, everything behind it is unreachable
- —Simplifies the frontend significantly, at the cost of one more service to deploy and monitor
- —A backend-for-frontend approach (one gateway per client type) avoids one-size-fits-all API responses, at the cost of some duplication across gateways
Related
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