API Gateway vs Load Balancer: What's The Difference

Author

Govardhana M K
May 06, 2025

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IN TODAY'S EDITION

🧠 Use Case

  • API Gateway vs Load Balancer: What's The Difference

🚀 Top News

👀 Remote Jobs

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🧠 USE CASE

API Gateway vs Load Balancer: What's The Difference

Since the types of Load Balancers, their quota limits, and API Gateway restrictions are already available in cloud provider’s official documents, let’s not repeat those here.

I’ve made this to simplify your understanding.

How It Works

Here’s how these components show up in real production systems.

Scenario 1: Public APIs for a Mobile App

You are building a mobile app backend. It has endpoints like: POST /login, GET /profile, GET /products

What you use:

Client → API Gateway → JWT validation → Rate limiting → Usage plan check → Route to Lambda

Why not just Load Balancer?
Because Load Balancer doesn’t know anything about users, tokens, or usage quotas. You’d have to build all of that into your app logic.

Scenario 2: Internal Microservices in a VPC

You have 5 backend services running on ECS. They talk to each other over private network. No external access.

What you use:

Service → ALB → Path based routing (/user/*, /order/*) → DNS based discovery → SSL termination → Health checks

Why skip API Gateway?

There’s no need for public access control, token validation, or request transformation. API Gateway would only add cost and latency here.

Scenario 3: gRPC based Data Pipeline

You’re building a high throughput ingestion system with real time processing using gRPC.

What you use:

Client → NLB → TCP level health check → SSL passthrough → gRPC on EC2 or containers

Why skip API Gateway?

API Gateway doesn’t support native gRPC streaming well. It introduces timeout limits and breaks long lived connections. NLB handles raw traffic better.

In short, if I have to present:

API Gateway is for:
Routing, Caching, Logging, Monitoring, Authorization, Rate limiting, Transformation, Load Balancing, Circuit breaker, Service discovery

Load Balancer is for:
Failover, Load balancing, Traffic distribution, Content based routing

Though they overlap on routing and load balancing, API Gateway focuses on managing how clients access services, while Load Balancer handles where the traffic goes.

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