Building an API Gateway to Get Out of the Monoliths

As DigitalOcean grew, we got to a point where we couldn’t force all teams (now dozens of developers) to work on the same monoliths. We needed a solution that wouldn’t throw away all the investment that had already been made, but that would allow teams to get up and running fast with new applications without reinventing everything.

We discuss why we decided to go the API gateway route, the challenges we had to overcome along the way, the mistakes we’ve made and how you can avoid them when adding an API gateway to your microservices architecture or when you want to start to move away from monoliths.

What You’ll Learn

• What is an API gateway and how you can use it.
• The challenges the Edge team at DigitalOcean had to overcome to make sure the migration into microservices wasn’t as bad as staying in the monolith.
• The importance of communication and self-service solutions for infrastructure.

This Talk is Designed For

Developers that are starting to think about microservices or that are already running on microservices-based architectures and would like to get a better idea of what and how they can use API gateways.

Prerequisites

An understanding of HTTP-based APIs.

Resources

Slides [Extended Q&A] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c4ZO_oClOb9SOYEcuMUwm2EJhxW1EgtxzqCuydvZRZo)

Maurício Linhares is a Senior Engineer on the Edge Team at DigitalOcean and was involved in building our API gateway from its beginnings. He’s passionate about distributed and functional programming, DevOps, and building infrastructure.