Dev adventures, epic bugs, tiny wins, and the occasional meltdown. Zola 2026-06-17T00:00:00+00:00 https://golden-fox.tech/tags/java/atom.xml 2026-06-17T00:00:00+00:00 2026-06-17T00:00:00+00:00 Aakriti Agarwal https://golden-fox.tech/projects/mini-api-gateway/ <p>I kept hearing about API gateways but never really understood what was going on inside one, so I decided to build a small one myself.</p> <p>The gateway takes requests through /proxy, checks the x-api-key header and uses Redis to rate limit each caller. Each key gets 5 requests per minute, with the 6th returning a 429. Requests that pass the filter are then forwarded to the upstream service.</p> <p>The part I found most interesting was using Redis expiry to handle the rate limit automatically instead of having to manage the counters myself.</p> <p>It is still a small project with one route and one upstream, but it gave me a much better understanding of how API gateways and rate limiting work.</p> <p><strong>Built with:</strong> Java 21, Spring Boot, Redis, Maven</p>