APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), in today’s digitally connected environment, are the connective tissue for modern applications that facilitate seamless communication across services and platforms — to deliver genuine digital experiences. The growing number of digital services being offered by businesses makes a powerful, consumption-scaled API gateway is mandatory. In this article, we investigate how you can create a scalable API Gateway in the cloud using NGINX and AWS API gateway by understanding their functions, configuration options as well as best practices.

Understanding the Need for an API Gateway

An API gateway is, literally speaking, an entry point in the system through which clients access different microservices of an application. This allows the communication between clients and backend services to be simplified and homogenized, providing features such as:

• Routing: To route the client request to a desired backend service.
• Load Balancing: It is the process of distributing incoming requests across multiple service instances (contenerized applications) to enhance performance and availability.
• Security: Managing authentication, authorization and encryption to keep data safe where only the right clients can use your services.
• Rate Limiting: limiting the request quota a client can make in order to protect backend services from potential overload and abuse.
• Monitoring and Logging: Collects metrics/ logs to monitor parameters, performance analysis, debugging issues as well tracking user usage.

API gateways are needed now more than ever with the rise of microservices architectures, as they play a significant role in enabling seamless and secure communication among services.

NGINX: The Power of Web Server and Reverse Proxy

Developed by Nginx, NGINX is an open-source high-performance web server and reverse proxy. This library is able to handle thousands of concurrent connections and hence it is popularly used for constructing API gateways.

Key Features of NGINX

• Reverse Proxying: NGINX can reverse proxy incoming requests to the appropriate backend services, and returning responses to clients while also hiding their implementation details.
• Load Balancer: NGINX provides intelligent, smooth load balancing algorithms like round-robin or ip-hash ensuring optimal resource utilization.
• SSL/TLS Termination : NGINX can perform SSL/TLS termination, reducing the overhead of cryptographic operations from backend services for faster performance.
• Not the good support for caching You are not going to have very native functionality and it is difficult if any  that you can cache responses from your backend services, which will reduce latency and improve throughput by keeping frequently accessed resources on NGINX.
• Security features: Includes the ability to secure via request validation, IP whitelisting and DDoS protection.

Cloud-Native Approach (AWS API Gateway)

The AWS API Gateway is a serverless web service for creating and managing RESTful APIs at any scale. It abstracts the complexities of handling infrastructure management and lets developers focus on developing APIs/services.

Amazon API Gateway Key Features

• AWS API Gateway easily integrates with a number of AWS services such as Amazon Lambda, S3 and DynamoDB which makes it easy to build serverless applications
• Automatic Scaling – Auto-scales based on the traffic patterns, so you get high performance during peaks without manual intervention.
• Security Features — It comes with built-in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authorization & authentication, API keys as well as usage plans.
• Monitoring and Logging : The implementation also works with AWS CloudWatch which enables developers to monitor the performance of APIs, configure alarms for unhealthy API instances, log all calls made by using an instance in a specific logged group.
• AWS API Gateway also can perform versioning, helps an organization to manage changes and updates without breaking the existing clients.

Building a Scalable API Gateway with NGINX and AWS API Gateway

For that NGINX and AWS API Gateway are mandatory as a cloud scalable API gateway. I will explain you in steps to set this architecture:

Step 1: Setting Up NGINX

• Deploy NGINX: You can deploy this on a cloud service like Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud, and you should be able to set up your own Elastic IP address for accessing it). Use an instance type which suits your traffic and performance needs best.
• NGINX: SSH Into your EC2 instance and Install NGINX. The following command can be used on, for instance, an Amazon Linux):

sudo yum install nginx -y

• Set up NGINX Modify the NGINX configuration file (/etc/nginx/nginx. conf): An API gateway to be created. The following is an example of what a basic NGINX config might look like for the API gateway approach.

http {
upstream backend {
server backend-service-1:80;
server backend-service-2:80;
}

server {
listen 80;

location /api {
proxy_pass http://backend;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}
}
}

In this example:

Inside the upstream directive, we are making a pool of backend services that nginx can use to forward requests.

Routed the requests to the backend services from /api path in location block.

• Secure Your API with SSL/TLS: If you wish to secure your API using an SSL/ TLS certificate (which is highly recommended) Simply acquire a CA-issued Certificate and configure NGINX to make use of it

server {
listen 443 ssl;
ssl_certificate /path/to/cert.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/key.pem;

location /api {
proxy_pass http://backend;
# other configurations...
}
}

• Start NGINX, (this command needs to be run for every start-up of your machine so that API gateway is accessible):

sudo systemctl start nginx

Step 2: Setting Up AWS API Gateway

• Create a New API Go to the AWS Console > Amazon API Gateway and Create new api Select either REST API or WebSocket API according to your use case.
• Resources & Methods: Define your resources (long /api/resource etc) and methods (GET, POST then getting them mapped to NGINX config.
• Connect to NGINX: Set integration type as HTTP and for each method set the endpoint URL of http:///api.
• Set up the Security measures: Secure access to your API by leveraging AWS IAM roles or setting use of an application generated (AWS)keys. Enable CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) if your API will be accessed from another domain.
• Create a Deployment: To setup your API you can create (or deploy to) a new or an existing stage Doing this allows Clients to get access to your API.

Step 3: Adopting Security Best Practices

• Use Rate Limiting: Leverage built-in throttling settings of AWS API Gateway to limit the number of requests per second for your API, protecting against abuse and ensuring stability.
• Authentication & Authorization: Use AWS IAM for permissions and roles. User authentication: You can also integrate with OAuth 2.0 providers
• Monitor API Usage – Deploy Cloudwatch Monitoring and Logging to analyze how the performance of your APIs for overall trends, identify issues in advance and understand usage patterns.
• Secure your APIs: AWS has a Web Application Firewall (Waf) that can be configured with the API Gateway to provide protection against common web exploits and DDoS attacks.

Step 4: Performance Tuning

• For example, AWS API Gateway provides support for response caching to reduce the load on backend services and improve performance of clients.
• Tune your NGINX Configuration: Fine-tuning the NGINX configurations will help to improve performance like for example set correct worker processes, connections according to expected load

worker_processes auto;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}

• CDNs: if your APIGateway for a semi-static content use (most of which should be served via CloudFront, etc)
• Load Test Your API: Perform load tests on a regular basis to find bottlenecks and optimize NGINX configurations, as well as AWS API Gateway configurations with actual usage scenarios.

Step 5: Optimize and Monitor

• Log Normalization: Interpret NGINX and AWS API Gateway logs to highlight trends, errors, security events.
• Keep Applying Security Patches: Regularly updates bash, the operating system and other cloud services to prevent API gateway to be an open door for hackers.
• Feedback: Collect feedback and use it to improve usability, performance and features of the API.

Conclusion

Undifferentiated heavy lifting Building a scalable API gateway Application oriented problem Likely to experience growing pains Easy HA Limited Load Balancing NGINX use case Busting the myth The solution 3.Licensing and Pricing Specialist requirements License structure Weakness with pricing Finding an acceptable price for both Nginx Plus and AWS Marketplace Individual cloud environment Cost Complexity Solution Comparison Summary References Working Brain . There are a lot of powerful features in NGINX that can be used with AWS managed services to make sure inter service communication between microservices is secured, efficient and high-performing.

Businesses wanting to stay competitive in the digital landscape, will need a scalable API gateway as increasing demand for APIs is only set to grow. With the help of best practices and following steps mentioned in this article, teams can build a doggedly API gateway that fulfills their ever-evolving needs while being performant & secure.