Lunar.Dev using Lunar.Dev Gateway

Traditionally, gateways evolved to help API providers control their resources and limit the usage of their API in a way that does not exhaust their systems, quotas and resources. But enter Lunar.dev - a new way to look at quota and consumption management - from the consumer side. Unlike traditional gateways that impose restrictions, Lunar.dev flips the script.

Imagine two critical use cases as consumers of third party APIs: handling rate limits for legacy API providers or managing multiple consumers with a single API provider. Also, some companies typically handle third party API tokens of their customers to provide services such as visibility, analytics, threat detection, and resource optimization. Each of these categories presents its own unique challenges. 

These use cases require meticulous handling, they also often require priority queuing, something typical API gateways lack, queuing flows and client-specific rate limiting with horizontal scalability and redundancy in mind. 

If this rings familiar… The next natural question then follows: “How do you manage, optimize, and control the vast amount of third party API traffic while maintaining operational efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness?”

Dog-Fooding @ Lunar.dev

At Lunar.dev, we’re not just solving these all challenges for others; we’re embarking on our own journey by using our very own Lunar.dev Gateway to manage external traffic. This is more than just a tool; it’s our paradigm and the foundation of how we operate. It empowers us to effectively manage all the traffic between us and our third-party providers.

In this article, we’ll delve into how the Lunar.dev Gateway operates, its benefits, and why leveraging it internally is a strategic decision.

The Challenges of External API Traffic Management

Managing API consumption at scale is no small feat. 

As APIs power an ever-growing number of features, the challenges associated with external API consumption increase. 

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Key challenges include:

Reliability: Ensuring that API traffic is handled in a way that guarantees high availability and resilience.

Visibility: Knowing what API calls are being made, how often, and at what cost.

Rate Limits: Third-party API providers often enforce strict rate limits, potentially throttling critical services.

Security: Ensuring that sensitive data is protected while making external API calls.

Cost Optimization: Reducing overhead, caching management and load balancing API calls.

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A Gateway for External Traffic (Lunar.dev Gateway)

Lunar.dev Gateway is a core component of our platform. 

It acts as an intermediary between our internal services (running in K8s cluster) and the external APIs we consume. By routing all outbound API and upstream traffic through our own Lunar.dev Gateway, we are not only a company that can monitor, optimize, and take control over its API consumption.

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Key Functions of Lunar.dev Gateway:

Traffic Management: It allows the ability to define and enforce policies that regulate API traffic, including quotas, rate limiting, and error handling.

Request and Response Filtering: Lunar.dev Gateway can inspect both requests to and responses from external APIs, ensuring necessary data is sent or received, while also enforcing privacy regulations on the outbound and inbound traffic.

Security Enforcement: By running traffic through Lunar.dev Gateway, we ensure security policies such as TLS, mTLS, and authentication tokens are enforced consistently.

How it works in practice

Optimizing API Usage

With Lunar.dev Gateway in place, every API call to a third-party provider is intelligently evaluated. This ensures optimized outbound traffic management and load balancing, reducing costs while staying within original usage limits. By efficiently utilizing available quotas, Lunar.dev maximizes API consumption without exceeding boundaries.

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Enforcing Quotas and Rate Limits

It’s a known habit to protect your services and impose rate limits (which is often used by third party providers). Lunar.dev Gateway is able to enforce its own rate limits on top of the third-party restrictions. For example, if a specific API allows 1000 requests per hour, Lunar.dev Gateway can manage the requests internally to ensure that traffic is smooth and rate limits aren’t exceeded, avoiding unnecessary downtime or throttling.

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Error Handling and Traffic Shaping

Lunar.dev Gateway provides robust error handling capabilities. If a third-party API becomes unavailable or starts failing intermittently, Lunar.dev Gateway can reroute traffic, delay requests, or fall back to a cached response. This helps maintain service continuity and improve the user experience.

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Security and Compliance

Lunar.dev Gateway plays a critical role in ensuring that API requests meet the company’s security and compliance standards. By controlling the outbound traffic, Lunar.dev can enforce mTLS for all external communications, ensuring that data is encrypted and secure. Additionally, Lunar.dev Gateway verifies API keys, tokens, and other authentication mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access.

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Why Are We Using Our Own Gateway

We believe in the power of our own product

For the past two years, Lunar.Dev Gateway has been at the heart of our daily operations, and we take great pride in its development. Our passion and dedication have gone into making Lunar.dev Gateway the trailblazer of all consumers API gateways, ensuring it delivers exceptional value and performance. 

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By using it ourselves, we continually refine and enhance its capabilities, confident that it meets the highest standards for managing our own API traffic.

Full Cataloging and Routing Controls

By routing our own APIs through Lunar.dev Gateway, we gain complete visibility into traffic patterns, usage statistics, and costs for each API. 

While it’s possible to get tracking and visibility with other tools, Lunar.dev is like an enrichment layer for better granularity and controls that can also fit your visibility stack and works with it (Datadog, Prometheus, Graffana etc). This level of insight has transformed how we manage data, empowering us to make informed, API-driven decisions and positioning us as a data-centric company. 

Driving Cost Efficiency

API consumption can quickly become costly, especially with GenAI third-party providers. Lunar.dev Gateway helps us minimize expenses by intelligently balancing traffic, managing load, and aggregating requests. Additionally can help leverage negotiations on pricing and usage tiers with providers - Learn more about how to negotiate with API providers here. Lastly, it ensures seamless operation by handling traffic efficiently when third-party services experience downtime.

Performance and Resilience

Lunar.dev Gateway improves the overall performance of the platform by handling traffic shaping, load balancing, and error recovery. If an API provider experiences downtime, Lunar.Dev Gateway ensures that the service continues to operate without interruption by rerouting or caching responses. Read more about our benchmarking practices here. 

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Seamless Horizontal Scalability  (Lunar.dev Pro feature)

Built with horizontal scalability and redundancy in mind, Lunar.dev’s clustering architecture ensures your API management grows with your business, offering unparalleled stability and cost efficiency. 

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As the platform scales and consumes more APIs, Lunar.dev Gateway offers a robust solution for traffic management and resource sharing. It efficiently handles large volumes of API requests and responses without compromising performance. This scalability is essential for managing data bursts, which often accompany the growing complexity of API consumption.

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Leveraging Lunar.dev Gateway for Our Customer Success

The internal use of Lunar.dev serves as a testing ground for our ongoing development and deployment of new features. It plays a crucial role in our CI/CD process, enhancing performance while accommodating higher loads and broader API management solutions.

By utilizing our own products in production, we ensure that the Lunar.dev Gateway is robust, reliable, and scalable for new customers. This approach allows us to identify and address potential issues during delivery, helping us define limitations and establish best practices for our product.

Customers using the Lunar.dev Gateway can take advantage of the same traffic management features we utilize internally, ensuring they have the necessary tools to manage and take control effectively over their API consumption.

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To sum everything up...

Our scalable, production-grade API layer has transformed our operations, enabling us to monitor and optimize API traffic effectively. 

Unlike traditional gateways, lunar.dev flips the script. 

We share here our journey through the complexities of API management. As APIs become essential for digital platforms, we’ve faced challenges in its orchestration, including reliability, security, and cost.

More than just a tool, it’s an integral part of our journey, providing the confidence to manage resources while delivering valuable insights. By adopting this innovative approach, we hope to inspire others to navigate their API challenges with the same level of control and efficiency. 

If you’d like to become part of our community of satisfied customers at Lunar.dev, visit our website to book a demo and see what we have to offer!.

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