Designing an API Gateway with Routing, Auth, and Filter Chain

Short summary

A thorough guide to designing an API gateway, covering routing, authentication, and the filter chain pattern. It explains how gateways consolidate cross-cutting concerns like TLS, auth, rate limiting, and CORS into a single ordered pipeline. The article compares JWT vs opaque token approaches and references real-world implementations from Netflix (Zuul), Kong, and Envoy.

• •API gateways consolidate cross-cutting concerns (auth, TLS, rate limiting, CORS) into one ordered filter chain
• •JWT enables fast local verification but hard revocation; opaque tokens allow instant revocation but need per-request lookups
• •Real-world examples: Netflix Zuul, Kong on Nginx, Envoy in service meshes all use the same filter-chain model

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