API gateway technology has evolved a lot in the past decade, capturing more prominent and more comprehensive use cases in what the industry calls “full lifecycle API management.”
API gateways were management of the network runtime that allows us to expose and consume the APIs, secures, and govern our API traffic. They provide a series of functionalities to support the development cycle, including creating, testing, documentation, monitoring, and overall exposure of our APIs.
Then around 2017, another pattern emerged from the industry: service mesh! Service Mesh is an infrastructure layer for microservices communication. It abstracts the underlying network details and provides discovery, routing, and a variety of other functionality.
I want to illustrate the differences between API gateways and service mesh — and when to use one or the other pragmatically.
This talk will also discuss the similarities and differences between the communication layer provided by gateways and service mesh.