From the course: Microservices Foundations

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The API layer

The API layer

From the course: Microservices Foundations

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The API layer

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- An API layer is often included with microservices architectures, and for a good reason. In a pure microservices architecture, an API layer is nothing more than an aggregated proxy of all of your service offerings. The API layer is used to shield the outside world or even your clients from knowing the structure, organization, or even what exact service is exposing a specific operation, which is actually very useful. The API layer provides a standardized proxy interface that will expose whatever service endpoints and API operations we configure it to expose. We need to be careful here that we aren't transforming the APIs. There's a better way to do that for, say, a mobile client versus a desktop client. The API layer, in my opinion, is a pure proxy. Consider our use cases around scaling up our system under load, or scaling down under a lull. If our service consumption model is one in which we are bound directly to the hosts, managing this infrastructure can become painful, especially…

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