API gateways: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Jim Gough (Morgan Stanley), Matthew Auburn (Morgan Stanley)

2:15pm–3:05pm Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Location: Grand Ballroom West

Application architecture, Fundamentals

Secondary topics: Best Practice, Case Study

Average rating:

(4.00, 5 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

Architects, developers, DevOps practitioners, and SREs

Level

Beginner

Description

Microservices are everywhere, and when implemented properly can give significant architectural advantages. However, there’s also the counter to this where concerns aren’t thought through, and the bad or even ugly side of microservices can emerge. API gateways are a key architectural pattern that solve a whole range of problems, including routing and even security. They can be used off the shelf without considering the various factors and features—until you find yourself in a gun-slinging outage.

James Gough and Matthew Auburn outline why you should use an API gateway, the patterns you can use, and the problems it will solve for you. You’ll explore technical implementation details and concerns addressed in code for building API gateways and get a glimpse of the ugly side of getting things wrong. Along the way, you’ll discover why testing with gateways and microservices is key and how test containers and chaos engineering helps ensure your ecosystem works as planned and scales effectively. Join in to escape the microservices Wild West.

What you'll learn

Explore technical details and testing of microservices
Understand more about this key component that's often taken for granted
Learn about different types of API gateways and how to use them in an architecture effectively while avoiding potential anti-patterns

Jim Gough

Morgan Stanley

James (Jim) Gough is an executive director and developer at Morgan Stanley, where he’s focused on building customer-facing technology. A Java developer and author, Jim first became interested in Java during his degree program at the University of Warwick; after graduating, he became a member of the London Java Community. Community has remained central to Jim’s contributions, which include working on the design and testing of JSR-310 and serving on the Java Community Process Executive Committee for several years. Jim’s a regular conference speaker and spent four years teaching Java and C++ around the world.

Matthew Auburn

Morgan Stanley

Matt Auburn is a passionate software developer at Morgan Stanley, where he works as an API developer. Matt owns the DevOps and Security API components. He’s a Java developer at heart, but he also writes automated tests in Python and has an interest in Go. He enjoys learning new technologies, mentoring, and teaching developers.