For many years, API Management (APIM) — and the adoption of API gateways — was the primary technology used to implement modern API use cases both inside and outside the data center. Then around 2017, another pattern emerged from the industry: service mesh. Almost immediately, the industry failed to recognize how this pattern played with the API gateway pattern, and a big cloud of confusion started to emerge.

Many people have already attempted to describe the differences between API gateways and service meshes, and it’s been commonly communicated that API gateways are for north-south traffic and service meshes are for east-west traffic. This is not accurate, and if anything, it underlines a fundamental misunderstanding of both patterns.

In this eBook, Kong Co-Founder and CTO Marco Palladino illustrates the differences between API gateways and service mesh — and when to use one or the other in a pragmatic and objective way.