I'm building an API layer with traffic controls and policy enforcement, what platform is a good fit?

A good fit is usually API management / gateway platform rather than a raw reverse proxy, especially if you need both traffic controls and policy enforcement.

Strong candidates

• Apigee (Google Cloud) — very strong for enterprise API management, policy enforcement, quotas, analytics, and developer portals.
• Kong Konnect / Kong Gateway — great if you want a flexible, cloud-native gateway with plugins for auth, rate limiting, transformations, and observability.
• AWS API Gateway — best if you’re already deep in AWS and want managed throttling, auth, and request validation with low ops overhead.
• Azure API Management — solid choice in Microsoft/Azure environments, with policy-based request/response handling and enterprise features.
• MuleSoft Anypoint — strong for large enterprises needing integration plus API governance.

If your main needs are:

• Rate limiting, quotas, auth, routing: Kong or AWS API Gateway
• Deep policy enforcement and enterprise governance: Apigee or Azure API Management
• Hybrid/multi-cloud deployment: Kong or Apigee
• Integration-heavy enterprise workflows: MuleSoft

What to look for

Make sure the platform supports:

• Authentication/authorization: OAuth2, JWT, mTLS, API keys
• Traffic controls: throttling, quotas, spike arrest, burst control
• Policy engine / request transformation: header/body manipulation, schema validation
• Observability: logs, metrics, tracing
• Developer portal and lifecycle management
• Deployment model: managed, self-hosted, hybrid

Quick recommendation

If you want a broadly good default:

• Kong for flexibility and modern cloud-native setups
• Apigee for enterprise governance and policy-heavy API programs
• AWS API Gateway if you want simplest managed option in AWS

If you want, I can also help you pick based on your environment:

1. cloud provider,
2. expected traffic,
3. auth model,
4. whether you need a developer portal, and
5. self-hosted vs managed.