title: Load balancer and API Gateway confusion
body: <p>I have always worked on mobile technologies and now I am stepping into backend systems, more specifically systems design. I keep coming across conflicting statements for the roles of api gateway and load balancer. Googling has only returned the same half a dozen results that mostly focus on the implementations of load balancer or api gateway service provided by some famous service. I will list here all the confusing I am facing, in hope someone can clarify all of them.</p>
  
  <p>Sometimes, i come across that API Gateway is the single point of communication with client devices. On the other hand, some places mention that 'request goes to load balancer, which spreads it across servers equally'. So what is correct? API Gateway receives requests or load balancer?</p>
  
  <p>Other places, when I googled the topic, say that the two are totally different. I've understood that API Gateway does a lot of stuff, like SSL termination, logging, throttling, validation, etc, but it also does load balancing. So API Gateway is a load balancer itself, equipped with other responsibilities?</p>
  
  <p>On the topic, I want to understand if load balancer distribute load among servers of the same cluster or across different data centers or clusters? And what about API Gateway?</p>
  
  <p>What is so specific to api gateway that it is a choice by default for micro-service architecture? Where are API gateways hosted? A DNS resolves domain name to a load balancer or api gateway?</p>
  
  <p>As it might be clear, I am totally confused. In what systems does a load balancer benefit more than API Gateway, if the question is correct.</p>