What is Spring Boot and Cloud API Gateway?
Spring Boot is an open-source Java-based framework used to create stand-alone, production-grade web applications and services. It is built on top of the Spring framework and provides a convenient way to set up a Spring-based application with minimal configuration.
An API gateway is a component that sits between your backend services and your API clients. It acts as a reverse proxy, routing requests from clients to the appropriate backend service and then returning the service’s response back to the client. An API gateway can also perform tasks such as authentication, rate limiting, and caching.
Spring Cloud Gateway is a lightweight, reactive API gateway built on top of the Spring framework. It is designed to provide a simple, yet powerful way to route and manage network traffic to your applications.
Spring Cloud Gateway uses a reactive, non-blocking architecture that can scale to handle a large number of concurrent requests. It can be used to route traffic to different backend services based on the incoming request, perform authentication and authorization, and perform other tasks such as rate limiting and caching.
The Evolution of API Gateways
Several factors are reshaping how users evaluate API gateways:
- How well does it scale to handle a larger volume of API traffic?
- How well does it perform at a larger scale?
- How well does it consistently deliver low-latency response times?
- Does it natively work in public cloud or any Kubernetes environments?
- Does it leverage the latest innovations in proxy technologies (e.g. Envoy Proxy)?
- Does it leverage the latest open source innovations around proxy technologies (e.g. WebAssembly or GraphQL)?
As each of these issues become more impactful to how an API gateway can enable your microservice applications, the more companies are beginning to choose a cloud-native API gateway. Cloud-native applications will respond best when the API gateway runs in the cloud with the rest of the services. Named a Visionary by Gartner, the Solo.io Gloo Gateway enables greater scalability and latency than legacy API gateways. Gloo Gateway is based on Kubernetes-native Envoy Proxy where many of the legacy API gateways are based on NGINX, HAProxy, or Java-wrappers on proxy technology. The result is a fast and secure API gateway built to scale with your cloud-native application.
In addition, Gloo Gateway is both public cloud native and Kubernetes native, so integrating with DevOps environments is seamless. And Gloo Gateway enables users to easily add new innovations such as Web Assembly or GraphQL to their API Gateway environment to handle next-generation application needs.
Spring Boot vs. Spring Cloud Gateway
Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Gateway are both frameworks that are built on top of the Spring framework and are used for building Java-based applications. However, they serve different purposes and are typically used in different parts of an application.
Spring Boot is a framework for building standalone, production-grade Spring-based applications. It provides a pre-configured set of libraries and components that can be easily integrated into new applications, and it can automatically configure and set up the application for you. This makes it a great tool for quickly developing and deploying new Spring-based applications.
Spring Cloud Gateway is a framework for building microservices-based applications. It provides support for routing and filtering incoming requests to microservices, as well as support for other common features needed to build a microservices architecture. It is typically used as an API gateway in a microservices-based application.
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