API Gateway Testing
API gateway testing verifies the layer that sits in front of backend services — routing, authentication, rate limiting, request transformation, and load balancing — rather than the services themselves. A correctly-behaving service can still fail end users if the gateway in front of it misroutes or mishandles requests.
Because a gateway is a shared chokepoint for every request, bugs there have outsized blast radius — a misconfigured routing rule or an overly aggressive rate limit doesn't just break one feature, it can break everything behind that gateway simultaneously.
Testing typically covers: correct routing to the right backend service, authentication and authorization enforcement before requests reach services, rate limiting behavior at the configured thresholds, and request/response transformation rules (header injection, payload reshaping) applied consistently and correctly.
