Microservices API GatewayMicroservices API Gateway

Overview

An API gateway for microservices architectures with intelligent request routing, adaptive rate limiting, circuit breaker patterns, and observability.

Problem

Service teams needed a single ingress layer that could route traffic predictably, protect downstream services from overload, and expose enough telemetry to debug production incidents quickly.

Architecture

• Routing Engine: Trie-based path matching with weighted load balancing
• Rate Limiter: Token bucket algorithm with Redis-backed distributed state
• Circuit Breaker: Configurable failure detection with automatic recovery
• Observability: Prometheus metrics, distributed tracing, and Grafana dashboards

Engineering Tradeoffs

• Kept rate-limit state in Redis so multiple gateway instances could share quota decisions
• Used circuit breakers to fail fast instead of letting unhealthy services consume connection pools
• Prioritized boring operational visibility over clever routing behavior

Key Achievements

• Designed and tested for high request volumes
• Supports rolling deployments through Kubernetes
• Reduced service-to-service latency through connection pooling
• Improved runtime stability with monitoring and fallback patterns

Validation Focus

• Load-test request routing and rate-limit behavior under sustained traffic
• Track latency, error rate, and circuit-breaker state through Prometheus dashboards
• Verify Kubernetes rollout behavior without dropping healthy upstream routes