API gateway concepts and patterns
View All Tags
Most "Hello World" tutorials get you to a running endpoint. This one gets you to a protected endpoint — with rate limiting, authentication, and an audit trail — because that's what production actually requires.
This is the freelancer edition: opinionated, fast, and realistic about what breaks first when you launch.
This checklist implements Zero Trust architecture with STOA Platform in 10 actionable steps. Each step is independently deployable and verifiable. Start from the top — steps 1-3 provide the most immediate security improvement and can be implemented in under an hour.
Zero Trust for API gateways means one thing: never trust, always verify — every request, regardless of network origin, must present verifiable identity and be evaluated against explicit policy before receiving access. This article explains the five Zero Trust principles and how they apply specifically to API gateway design, with concrete examples from STOA Platform's implementation.
AI gateways require specialized rate limiting approaches that account for token consumption, streaming responses, and variable request costs. Traditional request-per-second limits fail to capture the true resource usage of AI workloads. This guide covers token-aware rate limiting strategies, per-tenant quota management, and implementation patterns for production AI gateways.
The OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023) lists the most critical API security risks. An API gateway like STOA helps address several of these at the infrastructure layer — but not all of them. This article maps each OWASP risk to STOA's controls, with an honest assessment of what requires application-level implementation.
stoactl is the command-line interface for STOA Platform that brings kubectl-style API management to your terminal. Install it with one command, authenticate to your Control Plane API, and manage APIs, subscriptions, and MCP tools without touching the web console—ideal for scripting, CI/CD pipelines, and developers who prefer the terminal.
You've installed STOA. The health check returns 200. Now what?
The gap between "it runs" and "it's production-ready" is where most setups fail. This runbook covers your first 7 days with STOA — the operational habits that prevent 3am surprises, the monitoring that catches issues before your users do, and the hardening steps that separate a demo from a real deployment.
Circuit breakers are critical resilience patterns that prevent cascading failures in distributed systems by temporarily blocking requests to unhealthy backends. In API gateways, they act as automatic safety switches that detect failures, stop forwarding traffic to failing services, and allow systems time to recover before resuming normal operations.
You define an API once. STOA exposes it as both a REST endpoint and an MCP tool — same policies, same monitoring, zero duplication. That is the Universal API Contract (UAC), and this tutorial walks you through it in 5 minutes.
Most API platforms force you to maintain separate configurations for each protocol: one for REST consumers, another for AI agents via MCP. That means duplicated rate limits, duplicated auth rules, and twice the surface area for misconfiguration. UAC eliminates that.
Custom MCP tools let you expose any API as an AI-native interface that Claude and other AI agents can discover and invoke automatically. This tutorial walks you through creating, registering, and testing a custom MCP tool using the STOA gateway, from initial YAML definition to live invocation by an AI agent.