Practice : Secure API Gateways

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Secure API Gateways enforce authentication, authorisation, rate limiting, and monitoring at the edge of API traffic. They are a critical control point for safeguarding services, data, and consumers in distributed architectures.

By centralising API traffic management and security policies, teams can scale confidently, comply with data protection requirements, and deliver consistent and observable interactions across internal and external APIs.

Description of the Practice

  • API gateways authenticate users, validate tokens (e.g. OAuth 2.0, JWT), throttle requests, and log API traffic.
  • They enforce routing, response transformation, and service mesh integration where required.
  • Security features include TLS termination, IP allowlists, request validation, and threat protection (e.g. OWASP Top 10).
  • Tools include Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, and Envoy.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Select an API gateway that aligns with your architecture (e.g. microservices, hybrid cloud, serverless).
  • Secure all endpoints with HTTPS and enforce strong authentication tokens.
  • Define access control policies (e.g. roles, scopes, consumer groups).
  • Enable logging and basic anomaly detection for API usage patterns.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Integrate with identity providers for federated auth and dynamic token validation.
  • Apply threat detection and rate limiting to mitigate abuse or brute-force attempts.
  • Use API keys, JWT claims, or mTLS for service-to-service authorisation.
  • Monitor latency, errors, and access patterns to improve observability and health.
  • Validate payload schemas and sanitise inputs to protect backend services.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Treat APIs as first-class products - secure, observable, and well-documented.
  • Include API gateway policies in design reviews and threat modelling sessions.
  • Monitor API behaviour for anomalies and iterate based on real usage data.
  • Collaborate across teams to align gateway standards and practices.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Over-permissive access policies or inconsistent enforcement across APIs.
  • Poor visibility into internal APIs bypassing gateway controls.
  • Latency introduced by excessive gateway plugins or misconfigurations.
  • Incomplete or outdated API documentation increasing integration risk.

5. Signals of Success

  • APIs are consistently secured and observable through the gateway.
  • Consumers authenticate and authorise efficiently across services.
  • Threats and abuse are mitigated early via automated policies.
  • API traffic is monitored and used to inform scaling, tuning, and design.
  • Gateways support compliance, operational stability, and customer trust.