Unlocking API Gateway Best Practices: Insights from Weibo and Ziroom

On October 11, 2020, Ziroom held its first post‑pandemic technical closed‑door meeting for internal architects and senior engineers, featuring theme talks and interactive discussions on cutting‑edge industry technologies.

API Gateway in Weibo's Practice

Weibo live‑stream architect Ren Xiusheng explained how API gateways emerged from the transition from monoliths to microservices, providing unified access, traffic monitoring, protocol adaptation, and security. He described Weibo's centralized gateway (Rpcagent cluster) and decentralized approach using local agents, comparing their advantages and drawbacks. To mitigate latency and traffic concentration, Weibo introduced a decentralized gateway delivered as a binary package, improving stability, reducing single‑point failures, and lowering server costs. He also covered design aspects such as registration, configuration, shared storage, protocol decryption, and whitelist management.

Ziroom Gateway Evolution

Infrastructure engineer Dong Hao presented the evolution of Ziroom's API gateway from version 1.0 to 2.0. After evaluating common solutions like Spring Cloud Gateway, Zuul2, OpenResty, and Kong, the team chose Zuul with Nginx for service discovery in gateway 1.0. Over four years, gateway 1.0 suffered latency, delayed Nginx circuit breaking, and lacked traffic governance, prompting a migration to gateway 2.0 in March 2020. The new version integrates Kubernetes, uses fasthttp, connects with a service‑governance platform, and employs goreplay for traffic replay, with future plans to shift communication to a service mesh.

Ziroom Gamma‑RPC Framework Introduction

Architect Zhao Yao introduced Gamma‑RPC, a lightweight service‑to‑service RPC framework that generates server interfaces and multi‑language clients from a Protobuf definition. Emphasizing simplicity, cross‑language support, minimal core, standard documentation, and performance, Gamma‑RPC addresses Ziroom's needs for internal microservice communication. A live demo showcased its usage.

Discussion and Interaction

The session concluded with an open discussion on future gateway trends, security, and service mesh adoption. Participants shared experiences, challenges, and recommendations, gaining deeper insights into gateway selection, implementation, and promotion.