Introduction

Most enterprises accumulate multiple API management (APIM) platforms over time through mergers and acquisitions, cloud migrations, business unit autonomy, or tactical purchases. As a result, the proliferation of API gateways across teams, environments, and use cases introduces duplicate spend, fragmented governance, architectural complexity, inconsistent security posture, and operational overhead.

API Gateway Rationalization is a strategic initiative aimed at streamlining and optimizing an enterprise’s API management ecosystem. It involves assessing the current API gateway landscape, evaluating vendor solutions, and consolidating capabilities onto a single API gateway platform.

This article provides a field-tested guide covering why to rationalize (drivers), how to evaluate (evaluation approach) and what to define in the target model & transition strategy.

Drivers for Rationalization

Enterprises rely heavily on APIs to exchange data and support interactions both within and outside the organization. API gateways play a central role in the enterprise architecture by securing and managing API traffic. With a wide range of API gateway solutions offering different capabilities, deployment models and plugins support, individual portfolios often adopt gateways that address their immediate needs. Over time, this leads to a fragmented landscape with multiple platforms to operate and govern.

Common drivers for rationalizing API gateways include:

• Cost Optimization – Maintaining multiple gateways increases redundant spend across licensing, support, infrastructure and production support.
• Engineering and Operational Efficiency – Each API gateway vendor introduces its own proprietary tools, plugins, developer portal, supported languages etc. leading to inconsistent practices and challenges in sharing knowledge and resources across teams.
• Product Limitations – API gateways that do not evolve with modern technology trends or lack regular feature enhancements become bottlenecks for organizations scaling their digital offerings.
• Risk and Compliance – Different API gateway teams may apply varying security standards, compliance controls, audit processes, and retention policies, resulting in increased effort to maintain regulatory alignment across platforms.

Rationalization Approach

Once stakeholders align on the need for rationalization, the next step is to formally initiate the exercise. Stakeholders typically include architects, product SMEs, infrastructure leads, and support leads across portfolios using API gateway solutions.

The rationalization exercise generally follows the stages below:

• Capture Requirement Features – Begin by thoroughly understanding how existing API gateways are used. Conduct analysis workshops with existing API gateway SMEs and architects to capture both current usages and future enhancements. Engage operations & support teams to document non-functional requirements such as security, performance, traffic volumes, scalability, analytics and reporting. Outcome is a comprehensive set of requirements for each API gateway used across the organization.
• Consolidate Evaluation Criteria – Next, consolidate and standardize the collected requirements. This includes:
  • Refining requirements into generic, vendor-agnostic features.
  • Grouping features into functional capability areas such as API lifecycle management, API security, API governance, API economy, monitoring & analytics, and developer portal.
  • Capturing non-functional & operational capabilities such as performance, scalability, availability, observability and maintainability.
  • Applying weightage for the capabilities based on criticality.
• Evaluate & Select Vendor – The consolidated capability list forms the core evaluation criteria for assessing vendors:
  • Conduct a market study of leading API gateway vendors using analyst reports for insights into vendor positioning, vision, and execution capability.
  • Shortlist 2-3 vendor solutions for formal engagement through an RFP process.
  • Include responses from existing API gateway vendors if they are part of the evaluation.
  • Score each vendor against the evaluation criteria based on RFP responses & solution demos.
  • Conduct evaluation workshops with lead architects and API gateway SMEs to finalize scoring and select the most suitable platform.
• Define Target Model – Represent the target-state with a centralized API gateway vendor solution using the following viewpoints:
  • Target architecture showing integrations with identity providers, monitoring solutions, internal/external service providers, and consumers leveraging the unified API gateway.
  • Target operating model detailing people, processes, governance and operational frameworks to manage and use the selected API gateway effectively.
• Define Transition Approach – Establish the strategy for moving from multiple API gateways to a single platform
  • Outline transition phases depicting the evolution from the current state to the target state.
  • Identify API groups to be migrated in each phase along with the impacted systems, service providers and consumers.
  • Assess and define transition patterns such as Strangler Fig and parallel run for safely shifting API traffic to the centralized API gateway.

Conclusion

API Gateway Rationalization is a strategic initiative that delivers significant benefits in cost, performance, security, and developer experience. By assessing the current landscape, identifying key drivers, and executing a structured rationalization approach, organizations can streamline their API infrastructure and prepare for future growth. Although this article focuses on API gateways, the same approach can be applied to any product or platform rationalization initiative.

By rationalizing API gateways, organizations can gain:

• A consistent and Improved developer experience through unified tooling and documentation.
• Enhanced security, regulatory compliance, auditing and governance through standardized policies.
• Operational efficiency through reduced maintenance and support overhead.
• Cost savings from optimized licensing and infrastructure.

Technology leaders should prioritize rationalization as part of their digital transformation roadmap to ensure agility, scalability, and governance across their API ecosystem.