Secure API Gateways in Multi-Cloud Architectures: Performance and Policy Enforcement

Abstract

As enterprises increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, securing API communication across heterogeneous environments becomes a top priority. This paper benchmarks three leading API gateways—AWS API Gateway, Kong Gateway (open source), and Apigee (Google Cloud)—to assess their security enforcement capabilities, scalability, and latency performance in multi-cloud deployments. We configure each gateway to handle JWT-based authentication, IP whitelisting, OpenAPI schema validation, rate limiting, and request throttling. The testbed spans AWS, Azure, and GCP, simulating 10,000 concurrent API requests across services hosted in different regions. Apigee excels in fine-grained policy enforcement and analytics but exhibits higher latency (average 96ms), while AWS API Gateway offers low latency (54ms average) but more limited customization. Kong provides the best open-source flexibility but requires additional plugins and third-party integrations to match enterprise-grade security. We also test API key leakage scenarios, replay attacks, and policy misconfigurations, verifying how each platform handles anomalies. Secure logging, audit trails, and mutual TLS options are evaluated, with Apigee scoring highest in observability. The study concludes that API gateways must balance configurability, performance, and compliance requirements. We recommend deploying platform-native gateways for latency-sensitive applications, while favoring Apigee for policy-driven APIs requiring detailed monitoring. This evaluation serves as a decision guide for security architects in multi-cloud deployments.