API gateways from the increasingly federated, but often times centralized access to the digital resources and capabilities that exist within enterprise organizations. Gateways provide a place for teams to publish APIs, standardizing how authentication and access control is applied across APIs, bringing critical capabilities like rate limiting, caching, and other controls you need to manage your APIs at scale. API gateways have been around for this entire century, and have been commoditized over the last five years, but they are continuing to be the center of power within the enterprise, and innovation by continous waves of startups.
By my counts we are entering the four wave of API gateway evolution, where API gateways are much smaller, programmatic, specizlied, and allow for the deliver of multi-protocol APIs across cloud regions. Continuing to bake the API gateway into not just the fabric of the cloud, but of the web. API gateways will cntinue to be one of the most important aspects of our operations and where business occurs acros the infrastructure, applications, and integrations we depend on to do business each day. Keep an eye on what is happenign with gateways today, avoid signing to long of a contract with one of the earlier generation API gateway providers, because what is coming next is where the action will be.
