Why Your API Gateway Is Slowing Down Your Microservices

Episode 60 of The Developer Tools Podcast dives into a common but often overlooked performance bottleneck: the API gateway. Lucas and Luna examine a real case from Shopify, where their internal API gateway introduced 87 milliseconds of median latency per request in early 2026. They break down the causes—serialization overhead, TLS handshake costs, and bloated middleware chains—and discuss how Shopify cut that latency by 60% using lightweight sidecar proxies and connection reuse. The episode also covers trade-offs between centralized gateways and service mesh approaches, and why over-reliance on a single gateway can hurt reliability. If you're building or running microservices, this episode will give you concrete numbers and strategies to optimize your API gateway without sacrificing security or observability. #APIGateway #Microservices #Latency #Shopify #Performance #SidecarProxy #ServiceMesh #BusinessAndTechnology #DevTools #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Infrastructure #SoftwareEngineering #TLS #Middleware #Observability #DeveloperExperience #GoLang Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo