Cloud-native API gateway

If you need a fully managed API gateway within a single public cloud ecosystem, I’d focus on the cloud provider’s native gateway service rather than a third-party or self-hosted solution.

The key criteria are:

• Fully managed operations: the provider handles infrastructure, availability, scaling, and maintenance.
• Native integration: works closely with the cloud’s identity and access management, networking, monitoring, logging, secrets, and security services.
• Ecosystem alignment: supports the provider’s compute platforms, serverless workloads, and deployment tooling.
• Governance and security: provides authentication, authorization, rate limiting, traffic controls, and policy enforcement.

Recommended native API gateways

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1. Amazon API Gateway

(Best for AWS-native workloads)

Fully managed API hosting with native AWS integration. Supports private backend integrations through VPC links, making it suitable for APIs backed by private services and load balancers.docs.aws.amazon.com+2

Best fit: Lambda, ECS, and other AWS-hosted applications.

Official documentation:Amazon API Gateway

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2. Azure API Management

Best for enterprise API governance, centralized API policies, developer portals, authentication, quotas, and monitoring. Integrates with Azure Monitor and Microsoft Entra ID, with virtual-network deployment options.azure.microsoft.com+2

Best fit: enterprise applications with strong governance and security requirements.

Official documentation:Azure API Management

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3. Google Cloud API Gateway

A fully managed, pay-per-use service that integrates with Google Cloud's development, monitoring, logging, and tracing tools. It can secure access to backends such as Cloud Run through service-account IAM permissions.docs.cloud.google.com+1

Best fit: REST APIs on Cloud Run and other Google Cloud backends.

Official documentation:Google Cloud API Gateway

Which should you choose?

My recommendation: choose the gateway native to the cloud where your applications, identity services, networking, and observability already reside. If you need advanced enterprise API lifecycle management, Azure API Management or AWS's broader API management capabilities may be more appropriate than a lightweight gateway alone.

One important distinction: a fully managed service is not necessarily deployed entirely inside your own private network. If the gateway itself must have private network placement, verify the deployment tier and networking model before deciding.

Which cloud ecosystem are you targeting: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud? I can narrow this down to the best-fit service and architecture.