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Layer 5 of 20

API & Integration Gateway

Unified ingress/egress: API management, rate limiting, versioning, partner integration, and protocol mediation.

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.
API & Integration Gateway — HOWFAR Architecture — HOWFAR