Load Balancer Vs. API Gateway

Question 1

How are Load Balancers and API Gateways similar? What do they do?

Answer 1

They both are responsible for managing incoming traffic and requests.

Question 2

What’s the purpose of a load balancer?

Answer 2

To distribute network and/or application traffic across multiple servers.

Question 3

At a high level, how does a load balancer work?

Answer 3

It accepts incoming requests and routes them to the most appropriate server to handle them, generally determined through health checks and some specified routing algorithm (e.g. least connections etc.)

Question 4

What’s the purpose of an API Gateway?

Answer 4

An API Gateway sits between the client and a collection of backend services (like a reverse proxy) and routes the requests to all of the appropriate services and aggregates the results.

Question 5

When are API gateways most commonly used? Why?

Answer 5

You’ll typically see them in microservice architectures where they can provide a unified interface for clients to consume from.

Question 6

What’s the focus of a load balancer? An API gateway?

Answer 6

Load balancers focus on distributing traffic to avoid overloading servers, ensuring high availability and redundancy.

API gateways are more organizational and serve as a central point for managing and routing API calls.

Question 7

If a system required an API Gateway and a Load Balancer how would you arrange them?

Answer 7

Typically the load balancer would front the API gateway, but it depends.

Question 8

Why would you put a load balancer in front of an API gateway?

Answer 8

This is the most common configuration.

It distributes traffic to multiple instances of the API Gateway, ensuring redundancy (reliability) and removing it as a single point of failure.

Question 9

Would you ever front a load balancer with an API gateway? Why?

Answer 9

If the instances being routed to from the gateway required load balancing on their own, this would be a preferred approach.