API architecture
This cluster covers the structural decisions behind well-designed API systems — from gateway patterns and service mesh integration to microservices, event-driven APIs, and resilience. Whether you're designing a new API platform or evolving an existing one, these guides provide the architectural depth to make decisions that hold up at scale.
Articles
0 of 12 publishedAPI Architecture: Patterns & Principles
The architecture decisions that shape how APIs are designed, deployed, and governed at scale across an organization.
Architecture Diagramming for APIs
C4 model, system context diagrams, and how to document your API topology in a way teams can reason about.
API Gateway Architecture
Single gateway, federated gateway, and sidecar patterns — with trade-offs for each deployment model.
API-First Architecture
What API-first design means, how it changes developer workflows, and how to adopt it across an organization.
API Security Architecture
Defense-in-depth: TLS, WAF, gateway-level policies, and application-level controls layered together.
Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture
When microservices help, when they hurt, and how to use the strangler fig pattern for gradual migration.
Service Mesh vs API Gateway
Complementary or competing? When to use each layer in your architecture — and when to use both.
Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) Pattern
How BFFs simplify mobile and web clients, reduce over-fetching, and when to introduce one.
Event-Driven API Architecture
Webhooks, WebSockets, SSE, and AsyncAPI: patterns for real-time and asynchronous API integrations.
API Federation and GraphQL Supergraph
Federating APIs across teams and services using Apollo Federation or schema stitching.
Circuit Breakers and Resilience Patterns
Timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and bulkheads for building API systems that fail gracefully.
API Caching Strategies
HTTP caching headers, CDN caching, gateway-level caching, and cache invalidation done right.
Design resilient API architectures with WSO2
WSO2 API Manager supports API gateway, service mesh integration, and event-driven patterns — built for enterprise scale and cloud-native deployments.
The open, universal platform for managing every API and AI service at scale. 100% open source.