API Gateways for Beginners: Build, Secure & Scale Microservices with NGINX, Kong, AWS API Gateway, Traefik & Kubernetes

By Hollis Denning

API Gateways for Beginners: Build, Secure & Scale Microservices with NGINX, Kong, AWS API Gateway, Traefik & Kubernetes

Modern applications rely on APIs-and as systems grow into distributed microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless workloads, API gateways become the critical control plane that determines whether your platform remains fast, secure and reliable. Yet most books on API gateways are outdated, theoretical, or tied to a single vendor. This book is different. It is fully modern, fully hands-on, and built for the real-world architectures used across today's cloud-native platforms.

Designed for beginners and professionals alike, this book teaches you how to build, deploy, secure, automate and operate API gateways using industry-leading tools: NGINX, Kong Gateway, Traefik, AWS API Gateway, Kubernetes Gateway API, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Keycloak, OPA, GitOps, and APIOps pipelines. Every chapter includes step-by-step labs you can execute immediately using Docker, Kubernetes (kind/k3d), or AWS-culminating in a full end-to-end production-grade multi-gateway platform.

You will learn exactly how API gateways work, how they differ from load balancers and service meshes, and how to integrate them into microservices, serverless, and hybrid cloud environments. More importantly, you will learn how to secure APIs properly, applying TLS, JWT, OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, rate limiting, WAF rules, secrets management, OpenAPI-first workflows, and policy-as-code. The book also goes deep into observability, showing you how to integrate Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, Loki/ELK logs, and OpenTelemetry traces for full visibility across your entire API estate.

Whether you want to become a backend engineer, DevOps specialist, SRE, cloud architect or API security engineer, this book gives you the skills and practical experience required to deliver real API platforms used in enterprises today.

What You Will Build and Learn

Deploy API Gateways with NGINX, Kong and Traefik in Docker and KubernetesBuild and secure REST and gRPC microservices with JWT, OAuth2, OIDC and mTLSApply rate limiting, caching, CORS, WAF rules and request/response transformationsIntegrate AWS API Gateway with Lambda, Cognito, WAF and cost-optimized cachingAutomate gateway deployments with GitOps and APIOps pipelinesApply OWASP API Top 10 protections across all gateway typesBuild complete observability for gateways using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and OTelImplement multi-gateway governance using OpenAPI and policy-as-code (OPA, Keycloak)Design a full-scale production architecture combining NGINX, Kong, Traefik and AWS API Gateway

Hands-On Labs Included in Every Chapter

Each chapter guides you through building something real-routing configurations, auth flows, rate limits, dashboards, tracing pipelines, CI/CD automation, and more. The labs progressively build toward a complete multi-cloud, multi-gateway platform that mirrors real enterprise systems.

Perfect For

Backend DevelopersDevOps & SRE EngineersCloud ArchitectsAPI Security EngineersPlatform Engineering TeamsStudents and Beginners entering cloud-native development

If your goal is to master modern API gateways-not just in theory, but in real production-ready workflows-this is the book you've been looking for.
By the final chapter, you will have the practical skills and a full end-to-end solution that demonstrates your ability to design, secure, scale and operate APIs at a professional level.

This is the complete, modern, and hands-on API gateway book the industry has been missing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GC342TK5
• ISBN13: 9798279417391
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.5" x 11.0"