How does DreamFactory behave as an API gateway?
DreamFactory runs as an API gateway in your environment, or behind your existing API gateway, providing core API functionality for routing, traffic management, and observability over every data API. The DreamFactory AI data gateway keeps the gateway, policies, and analytics close to your systems so you can shape and monitor traffic without rewriting back-end services.
Core API gateway features
Reverse proxying, routing, and transformation across services and data APIs
Resilience and availability
Health checks, load balancing, and failover to keep APIs online
Traffic shaping and protection
Rate limits, quotas, throttling, and size limits at the edge
Caching and performance
Response and request caching to reduce load and latency
Observability and analytics
Central logs, metrics, and traces for complete API functionality visibility
Reverse Proxy and Smart Request Routing
DreamFactory works with your production environments to route, secure, and manage API traffic across backend services.
Reverse proxy
Forward client calls to internal services and hide their locations
Path-based routing
Direct requests to the right backend or version based on URL structure
Header-based routing
Use headers and metadata to steer traffic between services
URL rewriting
Adjust paths and query strings at the gateway without changing back-ends
Header manipulation
Add, remove, or modify headers for security, routing, and observability needs
Resilience, Health Checks, and High Availability
DreamFactory's API gateway features help keep data APIs and services resilient even when individual components fail.
Load balancing
Distribute traffic across multiple backend instances for performance and stability
Health checks
Probe gateways and services to drive routing and failover decisions
Failover and high availability
Switch traffic automatically when instances or zones go down
Safe rollout patterns
Support blue/green or similar strategies as you evolve APIs behind the gateway
Traffic Management and Protection
DreamFactory shapes, prioritizes, and limits API traffic as part of its core API gateway features.
Rate limiting
Cap how many requests a client can make in a given window
Throttling
Slow or temporarily restrict traffic when thresholds are exceeded
Quota management
Enforce daily, monthly, or plan-based consumption limits
Request size limits
Block oversized payloads that could harm downstream systems
Caching and Performance Optimization
These gateway features reduce load on back-end systems by caching work where it makes sense.
Response caching
Serve repeat requests from cache instead of re-hitting services
Request caching
Reuse upstream results for identical calls keyed by parameters
Tunable cache behavior
Configure cache keys, TTLs, and invalidation rules at the gateway layer
Observability and API Analytics
DreamFactory collects usage, performance, and error metrics for APIs and exposes them through logging and analytics so you can see how your AI data gateway is behaving in real time.
Request and response logging
Capture detailed call data for debugging and audits
Real-time analytics
Monitor traffic levels, latency, and error rates across services
Distributed tracing
Follow requests across microservices to find bottlenecks and failures
Standard telemetry
Export metrics via Prometheus and OpenTelemetry into your observability stack
Custom dashboards and alerts
Build views and alerts on key gateway and API functionality metrics