Lunar.dev versus Traditional API Gateways

Consumption Architecture: Behind the Scenes of Gateways

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As companies rely more heavily on external third party APIs - the risks and challenges of scaling with them become apparent. API quota management, consumption costs, rate limits and schema changes are some of the common challenges that can impact applications at scale. Those and other challenges pose the need for proactive API consumption management.

While many architects, especially at bigger companies with legacy architecture, would look to use their already existing traditional gateway products (think Kong Gateway, Mulesoft, Azure APIM or Apigee) for mitigating challenges with egress API traffic (eg. API consumption), these tools were simply not built for this purpose to begin with and the costs of such workarounds could be high. While it seems like it could be a great workaround versus adding more tools, it could be very advantageous to adopt a dedicated API consumption gateway that has a robust offering to manage and control any endpoint at little effort. This is especially important as companies start to scale, using LLMs, AI or consume APIs needing to meet larger workloads.

This post will explore the key advantages Lunar has over traditional gateways for API consumption use cases.

The TLD;R

1. Product Focus: Ingress vs. Egress Champions

Traditional API gateways excel at managing Ingress traffic, acting as the gatekeepers for API providers. They focus on securing incoming requests, routing them to backend services, and providing visibility into API usage on the provider side.

In contrast, Lunar.dev's API consumption management flips the script. It's optimized for Egress traffic, empowering API consumers to manage and optimize their outgoing API calls. This translates to:

• Cost Reduction: Identify and eliminate unnecessary API calls, reducing overall usage costs.
• Performance Optimization: Implement caching and other strategies to improve API call response times.
• Enhanced Visibility: Gain deep insights into how your applications consume external APIs, enabling better decision-making.

2. Traffic Capturing

Traditional gateways require manual configuration, forcing users to create a separate "proxy endpoint" for each API they want to manage and adapt their code to use this new endpoint. This involves finding the references in the codebase to swap the original endpoint URL with the proxied one – a tedious and error-prone process where developers are bound to miss certain requests.

Furthermore, this process is incompatible with many SDKs, making adoption even harder in certain deployment scenarios.

Lunar.dev takes a simpler approach. It can capture all outgoing traffic with changing hosts, acting as a single point of egress. This is particularly beneficial for:

• Dynamic APIs: Lunar.dev handles APIs with dynamic hostnames effortlessly.
• SDK Consumption: It seamlessly integrates with APIs consumed from SDKs, where URL changes within code might be difficult.

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3. Adoption Time

While adapting a traditional API gateway for egress traffic management is technically possible, it requires significant upfront investment. Here's why:

• Manual Configuration: Traditional gateways aren't designed to capture outgoing traffic by default. You'll need to manually configure the gateway to achieve this. Policy Retooling: Existing policies need to be adapted to address the nuances of egress traffic scenarios.

• Custom Plugin Development: Specific functionalities for egress use cases might necessitate creating or requesting custom plugins, further extending the development timeline. The cumulative effect of these steps can translate to a deployment time ranging from days to weeks, especially for large organizations.

Lunar.dev's approach flips the script. Built specifically with egress traffic in mind, it streamlines the deployment process, allowing you to be operational in minutes.

By focusing on a streamlined onboarding process, Lunar.dev significantly reduces the time to deployment compared to traditional API gateways. allowing to start reaping the benefits of API consumption management much faster.

4. Unveiling the Blind Spots: Visibility and Alerts

Traditional gateways lack dedicated dashboards for outgoing traffic. Visibility is limited to analytics around individual APIs or consumers, offering no proactive alerting on potential issues.

Lunar.dev provides a purpose-built dashboard specifically designed to organize API consumption visibility. It goes beyond basic analytics, offering features like:

• Real-time Alerts: Proactive alerts surface potential problems with your egress API calls.
• Intelligent Policy Recommendations: A suggestion engine helps you configure the right policy to address the identified alert.
• Dedicated Observability: Gain insights into usage patterns, predict traffic trends, and troubleshoot issues related to outgoing traffic.

5. Ready-Made Policies

Traditional gateways offer policies, but they're designed for ingress traffic management. They lack the domain knowledge to address specific challenges encountered when consuming external APIs. Additionally, these policies aren't customizable to individual consumer needs.

Lunar.dev offers a distinct advantage with pre-built Flows specifically designed for major API providers and common API consumption issues. These Flows leverage Lunar.dev's deep understanding of how these APIs work, offering:

• Reduced Configuration Time: Instantly deploy pre-configured policies for common scenarios.
• Aggregated Knowledge: Benefit from the collective wisdom of multiple API consumers, gaining access to a wider range of configurable policies.

6. Developer Experience: A World of Difference

Traditional API gateways prioritize the API provider's perspective. Their UI and policy configuration reflect this focus, often lacking the granularity needed for complex egress traffic use cases. For example, defining a prioritized API call queue that considers business logic and provider rate limits might be challenging.

Lunar.dev flips the script again. Every policy is crafted with specific API provider problems in mind, and offers fine-grained, client-side controls to address your business needs. It empowers you to:

• Manage Consumption Across Multiple Apps and Consumers: Gain control over API usage across your entire application ecosystem.
• Prioritize and Throttle API Calls: Implement business logic-based prioritization and throttling for optimal API usage.
• Chain Policies for Efficiency: Create workflows that combine caching and throttling policies for specific API provider endpoints.

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Recap: Find The Right Tool for the Job, The Wrong One Can Send You Back

Consumption Problems are usually recurring across APIs and end-points. The more the orginization scales, the likely it is to increase. Egresss traffic requires constant maintenance and optimization to increase the likelihood of effectiveness and minimize issues in production, and security threats.

Traditional API gateways prioritize the API provider's perspective.

By understanding the fundamental differences between traditional API gateways and an innovative API consumption management, you can choose the right tool to address your specific needs. Whether you're an API provider or consumer, this understanding empowers you to optimize API interactions and unlock new levels of efficiency.

When a product is built with the developer experience in mind, it shows. Lunar.dev's approach streamlines configuration, reduces development overhead, and empowers you to focus on building innovative applications.

If you're curious to learn more about API Consumption Gateways from our team of experts, or have a 1:1 demo, feel free to reach out to us at info@lunar.dev

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