DevOps | API gateway vs Load Balancer

API Gateway and Load Balancer are both important tools for managing traffic to your web applications but they have different purposes and use cases.

Load Balancer is primarily used to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers to improve performance, reliability, and scalability.

For example, imagine you have a web application that receives a high volume of traffic. You can use a load balancer to distribute the incoming requests across multiple servers to ensure that no single server is overloaded with traffic. Load balancers have different algorithms to distribute traffic such as round-robin, least connections and IP hash.

On the other hand, API Gateway is a server that acts as an intermediary between an application and a set of microservices.

API Gateway typically sits between your client applications and your backend services. It acts as a “front door” for your backend services, allowing clients to access your API with a single endpoint. It receives requests from the application(front end, android/ios app) and routes them to the appropriate microservice.

For example, imagine you have a web application that uses multiple backend services(microservices) such as a user authentication service, a database service and a payment gateway service.

You can use API Gateway to create a single API endpoint that handles requests to all of these backend services. API Gateway can handle authentication and authorization, route requests to the appropriate backend service and provide features such as rate limiting and caching.

When a client sends a request to the API Gateway, it can be routed to the appropriate backend services based on the request path or other parameters.

In summary, Load Balancer is used to distribute traffic across multiple servers, while API Gateway is used to manage APIs for your web or mobile applications. Both tools can improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of your web applications, but they have different use cases and serve different purposes.