In the previous chapter, we created microservices and registered with the Eureka registry server. This chapter will explore the need for the API Gateway pattern for microservices communication, either from UI components or from inter-service calls. We will implement API Gateway using the Netflix Zuul API. We will see how to set up Zuul Proxy in your application.

Spring Cloud provides support for Netflix Zuul to implement the API Gateway proxy for routing and filtering the actual microservice requests. This chapter will explore the following points and you will get a better understanding of API Gateway and Zuul proxy.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• The need for an API Gateway pattern
• API Gateway pattern components
• Implementing the API Gateway using Netflix Zuul proxy
• Including Zuul using Maven dependency
• Enabling the Zuul service proxy
• Configuring Zuul properties
• Adding Zuul filters