What Is API Gateway Federation? A Guide to Centralized API Management

What Is API Gateway Federation?

API gateway federation refers to the integration and management of multiple API gateways within a unified control plane. This approach allows organizations to use different API gateways, which may be from various vendors or tailored to specific environments (e.g., cloud-based, on-premises), while centrally managing their configurations, policies, and monitoring.

Figure 1: API gateway federation with a unified control plane

Reasons to Adopt Federated API Gateways

Customizability and Flexibility

• Organizations often have different API needs across departments or regions. Different gateways can be configured to meet the specific needs of various business units or applications.
• Beyond tailored setups, federated gateways also encourage innovation. Teams can test new features on specific gateways without impacting the broader infrastructure.
• Example: Employing Solace as an event broker in event-driven services.

Operational Resilience

• Gateway federation enhances fault tolerance across the API infrastructure. If one gateway fails, others continue to operate, minimizing disruption.
• It also simplifies maintenance. Gateways can be updated, patched, or even replaced independently, without needing a full system-wide deployment.
• Additionally, each gateway can scale independently based on traffic demands, improving resource efficiency.
• Example: Multi-cloud deployments with different maintenance windows and varying traffic loads.

Localized Compliance and Governance

• Many regions have unique legal and compliance requirements around data handling, API security, and privacy. Federated gateways enable region-specific enforcement of such policies, ensuring compliance without the need to enforce overly rigid global rules that may not be necessary elsewhere.
• By deploying APIs to local gateways (such as in the EU or APAC), organizations can also meet data residency requirements. This ensures sensitive information remains within jurisdictional boundaries, avoiding regulatory issues and building customer trust.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environment Support

• Gateway federation allows organizations to be truly cloud-agnostic. APIs can be deployed across multiple cloud providers (such as AWS, Azure, or GCP) based on cost, performance, or feature needs. This flexibility not only avoids vendor lock-in but also helps optimize resources across teams and geographies.
• Moreover, federated gateways make hybrid integration straightforward. On-premises systems can coexist with cloud native services under the same control plane. For example, internal systems hosted on VMware or bare metal can securely communicate with cloud-hosted APIs via Kubernetes gateways, enabling modernization initiatives.

Legacy Gateway Continuity

• Migrating away from legacy gateways often isn't immediate. Some business units may still rely on older systems, and rewriting everything at once can be both risky and expensive. Gateway federation offers a smooth transition path by allowing organizations to manage legacy gateways alongside newer ones from the same control plane. This coexistence enables gradual migration, testing, and replacement.
• Example: Unified control over legacy VM gateways and cloud-native Kubernetes gateways.

What Problems Are We Solving?

In many organizations, the use of multiple API gateways is common, driven by diverse business units, deployment models, or environments. This creates several challenges:

• Fragmented API governance: Cloud vendors, edge platforms, and hybrid deployments often operate with siloed policy enforcement, making it difficult to maintain uniform governance standards.

• Developer friction: Inconsistent control planes mean developers face different tools, configurations, and deployment methods, slowing down delivery and increasing cognitive overhead.

• Operational inefficiency: Managing different pipelines, monitoring tools, and configurations for each gateway adds unnecessary complexity and drains platform engineering resources.

• Legacy migration hurdles: Older gateways that still serve critical workloads often can't be immediately decommissioned, necessitating a solution that supports coexistence and gradual transition.

Who Benefits from Gateway Federation?

• API developers: Gain a streamlined, consistent workflow for creating, deploying, and testing APIs, regardless of the underlying gateway. They no longer need to learn or adapt to multiple control plane interfaces.

• API consumers: Discover, subscribe to, and use APIs from a unified Developer Portal—even if those APIs are served from different gateway backends. This improves usability and speeds up integration.

• Platform engineers and administrators: Reduce tooling sprawl and operational overhead by consolidating API gateway governance into a single control plane. Enables them to enforce security, rate limiting, and analytics policies centrally.

• Enterprise architects: Design more flexible, modular API architectures across multi-cloud and hybrid environments while preserving visibility and policy consistency.

• Business stakeholders and CIOs: Align technology choices with business unit requirements without sacrificing governance. Federation allows for local autonomy with central oversight, which is key for regulated industries or global organizations.

WSO2's Approach to Gateway Federation

WSO2 API Manager addresses these challenges with a unified API control plane that supports multiple gateway types:

• Universal Gateway for VM-based or cloud deployments
• Kubernetes Gateway for container-native environments
• Immutable (Micro) Gateway for edge or secure zones
• AWS API Gateway for deploying APIs on AWS infrastructure
• Solace Event Broker for event-driven architectures to deploy asynchronous APIs using the AsyncAPI specification

Figure 2: WSO2's unified API control plane with supported gateways for API federation

The API control plane allows you to:

• Publish APIs from a single Publisher UI: Define and manage APIs once and make them available across environments—on-prem, cloud, or edge—without duplicating workflows.
• Maintain consistent token validation and API policies: Apply security policies such as OAuth2/JWT validation, rate limiting, and scopes uniformly across all federated gateways.
• Use a single developer portal for unified API discovery and subscription: API consumers get a centralized marketplace of APIs regardless of where the APIs are actually hosted or deployed.
• Integrate event-driven and cloud native APIs alongside traditional HTTP APIs: Support AsyncAPI and real-time services (via Solace) as first-class citizens, enabling modern use cases like event streaming, IoT, and real-time analytics.

What We Support Today

• Central API Control Plane (ACP): One control center to configure, deploy, and manage APIs across all gateway types.
• Gateway environments: Choose which gateway environments—across regions, clouds, or business units—an API should be deployed to.
• Unified developer portal: A single developer portal to discover and interact with APIs, regardless of where they're deployed.
• Seamless key/token management: OAuth2/JWT token validation works across gateways.
• Pluggable gateway support: In addition to the gateways already mentioned, you can integrate any API gateway with the WSO2 Control Plane using our extension point. Simply build and register a custom gateway agent to bring your preferred runtime into the federated setup. Learn how to configure a custom gateway agent.

What's Next: Our Vision

API management is evolving. As gateway runtimes become standardized, the emphasis is shifting to governance, policy enforcement, and developer experience. Gateway federation is an emerging concept that shows considerable long-term promise and is expected to achieve mainstream adoption within the next 5–10 years.

WSO2 is actively investing in this space to unlock the full potential of federated API management. Our current capabilities allow publishing APIs to any number of connected gateways from a single API Manager Control Plane. The next stage in our vision is to govern APIs on external gateways (even those not published via WSO2) by connecting in read-only mode and applying governance capabilities.

We're continuing to invest in this area to:

• Add federated analytics and observability for better cross-gateway insights
• Support multi-tenancy and organization-aware federation
• Improve the self-service developer experience across federated gateways
• Enhance GitOps support for declarative gateway configuration

• Expand support for additional gateway types, such as Kong Gateway, Azure API Management Gateway, Apigee Gateway, and more.

Learn More and Get Hands-on

Want to see API federation in action? Follow our step-by-step guide to set up the Universal Gateway, Kubernetes Gateway, and Immutable Gateway—all managed through a single API Control Plane. Dive into the documentation to learn how to configure gateway federation for your team.

TL;DR: WSO2 API Manager brings centralized governance to distributed gateways, solving the mess of disconnected API operations across cloud, on-prem, and edge environments. With support for multiple gateway types and a unified control plane, platform teams can operate efficiently, securely, and with less risk.