Since its first public release in November 2022 and until September 2024 Nadles API Gateway was residing in a single data center in Germany. Even though it was a highly available redundant deployment, geographically it was limited to European region.
In order to ensure smooth operation of our customers’ APIs, decrease latency and processing times, we decided it’s now time to expand to new locations and, after a couple of months of solving technical challenges, Nadles API Gateway has become geographically distributed.
The transition to the new infrastructure was performed with zero downtime. The service was fully operational during the switchover period.
Geo-distributed infrastructure allows Nadles to serve your users with minimal latency. Whenever a user calls your API, our infrastructure picks the closest API gateway cluster and routes the HTTP request there.
One quick example: if your API is used in a mobile app with many users around the globe, each user of the app will communicate with your API through the closest instance of Nadles API Gateway. Which means, the app will stay responsive regardless of the user’s location.
We also got rid of the external dependencies the API Gateway had before. This had a massive effect on the internal engine-added latency: from tens of milliseconds (usually 4–10ms) it reduced to tens of microseconds. Basically, a 1000 times faster.
Another new feature is the fully automated instant SSL certificate issuance. Before, when you attached a custom domain to your API, you usually had to wait 10 to 15 minutes until the certificate is issued. With the new architecture it happens instantly.
Besides all other improvements, the new architecture allows us to spin up new clusters in any region and data center in a matter of days, and we’ll continue expanding our Point of Presence network in the coming months.
If you’d like us to expedite a rollout of the API Gateway in some particular region, please let us know by sending a message to support@nadles.com.
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P.S.
Wait, but my API is deployed in a single data center. How does distributed API gateway help?
Even if your API is deployed in a single instance, having a geographically distributed API gateway still improves the following for your users:
- Lower ping to the first entry point — the gateway instance — means faster connection establishing.
- Faster SSL handshake — the customer and the server don’t need to transfer the whole certificate chain to and from the region where your API is deployed.
- The gateway holds keep-alive connections to your API backend (if that’s allowed and supported by the backend), so there is no additional SSL handshake between the gateway instance and the API backend for each request from the user.
