Tyk Multi Data Center Bridge (MDCB) by Tyk manages and synchronizes distributed clusters of Tyk API Gateways. It supports Tyk Cloud and addresses the challenges of managing APIs in a distributed environment by optimizing performance and utility. MDCB deploys API Gateways in local data centers for geographically spread users, offering benefits such as reduced latency, deployment close to backend services, increased availability, and compliance with data residency regulations. It synchronizes API definitions and configurations across multiple gateways, ensuring consistency and reducing manual maintenance efforts. MDCB enables easy management of federated global deployments from a central Dashboard, allowing deployment of multi-data center Tyk Gateway clusters for redundancy, failover, latency optimization, and uptime. It acts as a broker between Tyk Gateway instances deployed globally, using a single Control Plane Gateway for configuration of APIs, keys, and quotas, and managing the propagation of these to the Data Plane Gateways. MDCB supports clusters of Tyk Gateways within or across data centers, allowing different configurations of APIs and users. It ensures high availability of Tyk API Gateways, as Worker Gateways can run independently. If the link to the Management Gateway goes down, Workers continue servicing API requests, and MDCB refreshes them with missed changes once the link is restored. If Worker Gateways fail and the link to the Control Plane is down, Tyk will automatically configure new Workers using the last known set of API resources in the worker’s cluster, minimizing service availability impact. MDCB runs on a resilient compressed RPC channel for ongoing and unreliable connectivity, with all traffic encrypted for safer use over the internet or inter-data center links. It improves data security by separating traffic into distinct clusters within the network and reduces latency by deploying Data Plane (Worker) Gateways near geographically distributed API consumers. Worker Gateways cache keys and configurations locally, allowing operations to be geographically localized. Rate limiting, authentication, and authorization are performed within the data center for all traffic to and from a Gateway cluster, reducing API request round trip time. MDCB provides a consistent place to manage APIM deployment, allowing a shared infra team to offer API management and API Gateways as a service across multiple clouds and self-managed regions.
