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GCP API Gateway vs Cloud Endpoint

Last Updated: 2022-02-12

Both API Gateway and Cloud Endpoint are used to manage your APIs: you create APIs to be hosted on GCP and to be consumed by others.

API Gateway is a relatively new offering.

The key difference:

  • API Gateway: fully managed by Google (based on Envoy), while
  • Cloud Enpoint: you need to manage your own. Google just provides a software package called Extensible Service Proxy, or ESP. (ESP v1 based on NGINX and ESP v2 based on Envoy) and you need to deploy it.

Google Cloud API Gateway reduces the complexity of deploying and managing APIs, and it is comparable to Amazon API Gateway and Azure API Management. I would not be surprised if Cloud Enpoint is deprecated some day.