API & Integration Gateway

Responsibilities

• Provide unified ingress/egress with governance (rate limits, auth, versioning).
• Standardize partner integrations and protocol mediation.
• Protect upstream systems via quotas and policy.

Key interfaces

• API contracts (REST/GraphQL), schema/versioning, and deprecation policy.
• Auth enforcement points (tokens, sessions, mTLS) where applicable.
• Rate limiting and abuse mitigation controls.

Operational signals

These are the measurements that tell you whether this layer is healthy in production.

• Request rate, error rate, and latency by route and consumer.
• WAF/bot mitigation events and blocked request volume.
• Quota exhaustion and throttling counts.

Failure modes

• Noisy neighbor consumers causing cascading failures.
• Breaking changes shipped without versioning.
• Insufficient abuse controls leading to incidents.

Production readiness checklist

• Adopt explicit versioning; publish change logs and deprecation windows.
• Enforce per-client quotas; add circuit breakers to protect upstreams.
• Capture structured request/response logs with redaction.