Free ebookAPI Gateways for Beginners: Managing, Securing, and Scaling Web APIs

Course Description

API Gateways for Beginners: Managing, Securing, and Scaling Web APIs is a practical ebook course for anyone working in Information Technology who wants to build reliable API layers for modern web servers and cloud computing environments. You will learn how an API gateway fits into real systems, why teams place it in front of services and functions, and how it becomes the control point for routing, security, performance, and visibility.

As you progress, you will gain confidence with gateway request routing using paths, methods, hosts, and backends, so clients reach the right service consistently. You will also learn essential gateway security concepts, including authentication with API keys, JWT, and OAuth2 basics, plus authorization and policy enforcement using roles, scopes, and least privilege. These skills help you protect web APIs from misuse while keeping developer access straightforward and auditable.

The course also covers API protection and stability techniques such as rate limiting, quotas, and traffic shaping to reduce abuse and smooth bursts. You will understand how request and response transformation can normalize headers and payloads, bridge protocols, and improve compatibility across clients and backends. For long term maintainability, you will see how API versioning and lifecycle management can be handled through the gateway to reduce breaking changes and simplify deprecation.

To operate APIs effectively, you will explore observability at the gateway with logs, metrics, traces, and correlation IDs, making troubleshooting faster across microservices and distributed systems. Real world reference architecture guidance shows how to place an API gateway in front of microservices and how to design a gateway pattern for serverless backends. You will also compare managed and self managed options, including AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, Kong, and NGINX, so you can choose what fits your requirements and constraints.

Finally, you will learn practical deployment and operations essentials across environments, security hardening, and scaling, helping you move from theory to production ready execution. Start this ebook course today and build the skills to manage, secure, and scale web APIs with an API gateway.