SAN FRANCISCO — February 15, 2024 — ngrok, the secure unified ingress platform for developers, today unveiled early access to its API gateway-as-a-service that marks a major advancement in how APIs are delivered.
This next-generation API gateway solution offers enhanced capabilities such as JWT authentication and authorization to strengthen API security, global rate limiting to ensure fairness among all clients and a flexible traffic policy engine that allows fine-grained traffic routing, all powered by a global network for production API traffic.
Developers have already been harnessing the power of ngrok’s unified ingress platform to serve APIs with just one command or one function call. With this new capability, ngrok transforms API delivery by putting developers in control.
“ngrok’s API gateway-as-a-service represents a major milestone that effectively bridges the gap between deployable and cloud-based solutions,” said Alan Shreve, founder and CEO of ngrok. “ngrok offers the best of both worlds — the robust set of advanced capabilities and environment independence of deployable gateways, combined with the simplicity and scalability of cloud-based solutions. In addition, ngrok’s API gateway-as-a-service frees developers from operational hurdles, accelerating release velocity and innovation.”
Shifting the paradigm with a developer-defined API gateway
Modern software development practices put more responsibility in the hands of developers. They’ve been tasked with building the business logic for their applications and APIs, along with ensuring API performance, scalability and resilience. To accomplish this, they rely on ingress, which serves as the front door for applications and APIs and becomes an integral layer of the application itself.
However, the process of delivering APIs is fraught with challenges. Developers rely on operations teams to deploy and deliver APIs to production, which delays API launches and results in lost revenue. Also, developers don’t have direct control over API gateways, leading to broken contracts between the API services and traffic management policies. This could result in misconfigured API gateways, which in turn causes API downtime, application performance issues and unauthorized access.
ngrok addresses these challenges with its innovative, developer-centric approach to API delivery, leading to the following outcomes:
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Faster delivery: ngrok integrates ingress directly into applications, allowing developers to establish secure API connectivity with a single command or line of code. This eliminates reliance on operations teams in production deployment while adhering to enterprise controls, governance and security measures to accelerate time to market.
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Reduced risk: By embedding ingress into the application itself, ngrok ensures that API requests contain all the necessary parameters expected by the API. This minimizes downtime, performance issues and unauthorized access that may arise due to poorly configured API gateways.
Eliminating trade-offs with best-in-class API Gateway capabilities
Today, developers and operations teams face a hard choice in implementing traditional API gateways. Deployable gateways, while offering environment independence and a rich feature set, come with high fixed costs and a heavy operational burden. Alternatively, cloud-based gateways may be simple to use and provide a pay-as-you-go model, but they lack advanced capabilities and create vendor lock-in. This dilemma prevents enterprises from realizing the full potential of APIs and adequately meeting the needs of their customers.
ngrok offers the best of both worlds by bringing together the strengths of deployable and cloud-based gateways. Developers and operations teams no longer have to choose between cloud-based and deployable API gateways to obtain the mission-critical functionality needed for production API traffic. The benefits of this approach are:
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As-a-service simplicity: Eliminates operational complexity and brings instant scale with ngrok’s always-on global network, negating the need for deployment, configuration or maintenance of multiple gateways.
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Feature-rich and flexible: Enables configuration of a robust set of features through a powerful traffic policy engine to shape and control the flow of traffic.
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True environment independence: Enables multi-cloud support without environment-specific configurations. Allows users to leverage the same configuration across public cloud, private cloud, localhost and CI environments.
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Pay-as-you-go scalability: Pay only for what you use, scale on demand without friction and transition effortlessly between development and production environments.
Learn more about the ngrok API Gateway on the company blog.
About ngrok
ngrok is a secure unified ingress platform for developers. It combines reverse proxy, firewall, API gateway and global load balancing to deliver apps and APIs. Over 5 million developers use ngrok for testing webhooks and previewing apps, and the world’s top technology brands — including GitHub, Zoom, HashiCorp and Twilio — advocate ngrok as a key integration partner. The company is venture-backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue. Learn more at ngrok.com and follow ngrok on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.