API Gateway Patterns

API Gateway Patterns Your API gateway is the front door to your entire platform — get it wrong and you're debugging cascading failures at 2 AM. This collection provides battle-tested configurations for Kong, AWS API Gateway, and custom Python/Node gateways covering rate limiting, authentication, request transformation, circuit breaking, and observability. Each pattern includes the config files, deployment notes, and the reasoning behind every design decision. Key Features Kong Declarative Configs — Ready-to-deploy kong.yml files with plugins for rate limiting, JWT auth, request transformation, and IP restriction AWS API Gateway Templates — CloudFormation and SAM templates for REST and HTTP APIs with Lambda authorizers and usage plans Custom Gateway in Python — Lightweight ASGI gateway using raw httpx for proxying, with middleware patterns for auth, logging, and rate limiting Rate Limiting Strategies — Sliding window, token bucket, and fixed window implementations with Redis and in-memo