Context and Problem
Clients interacting with multiple backend services may experience high latency and complexity when making multiple requests.
- Increased network overhead due to multiple API calls.
- Higher latency affecting client performance.
- Tight coupling between clients and backend services.
- Complex client-side logic to orchestrate multiple responses.
Solution
Gateway Aggregation consolidates multiple backend requests into a single API call, optimizing performance and simplifying clients.
- Deploy an API Gateway to handle request aggregation.
- Configure the gateway to make parallel or sequential backend calls.
- Combine responses into a single payload.
- Optimize caching to reduce redundant requests.
- Implement error handling and fallback mechanisms.
Benefits
- Performance improvement
- Reduces latency by minimizing network round trips.
- Simplified client logic
- Offloads request orchestration to the gateway.
- Scalability
- Handles high traffic loads more efficiently.
- Consistency
- Ensures a standardized response format.
Trade-offs
- Gateway dependency
- Clients depend on the gateway for all interactions.
- Processing overhead
- Gateway must handle request transformation and aggregation.
- Error propagation
- Managing partial failures in aggregated requests.
Issues and Considerations
- Latency trade-offs
- Combining multiple calls may increase response times.
- Data consistency
- Ensuring all responses are up to date.
- Security
- Implementing proper access controls in the gateway.
When to Use This Pattern
- When client applications need to call multiple backend services.
- When optimizing API responses for mobile or web applications.
- When reducing network overhead in microservices environments.