Comparison
API gatewayvsService mesh
API gateway
you put one component in front of all the services to do auth, rate limiting and routing once instead of in each of them.
A single entry point handling cross-cutting concerns — authentication, rate limiting, routing, request logging — for services behind it. It removes duplicated middleware and gives one place to enforce policy. It is also a shared choke point and a place for business logic to accumulate where nobody owns it.
Full entry →Service mesh
you get mutual TLS, retries and per-route traffic splitting without changing a line of application code, because a proxy sits next to each instance.
A layer of proxies deployed alongside services, handling routing, retries, mTLS and telemetry uniformly. It moves cross-cutting concerns out of each service's language and libraries. The cost is a substantial amount of operational machinery and a new class of failures that look like application bugs but live in the proxy.
Full entry →