What's the most effective API gateway for securing partner APIs with strict rate limiting and attack mitigation?

If your priority is partner API security, strict rate limiting, and attack mitigation, the “most effective” gateway is usually the one that combines:

• strong authN/authZ for partners (OAuth2, mTLS, JWT, API keys with quotas)
• fine-grained rate limiting / quotas
• WAF / bot / DDoS protections
• traffic inspection and anomaly detection
• good policy management and analytics

Best overall for this use case

Kong Gateway (especially Kong Enterprise / Konnect) is often the strongest fit for partner-facing APIs when you need:

• very granular rate limiting
• plugins for auth, IP restriction, schema validation, request/response transformation
• mTLS and JWT support
• integration with WAF/CDN/security tooling
• flexible deployment on-prem, cloud, or hybrid

Other top contenders

• Apigee (Google Cloud): excellent for API management, quotas, analytics, and enterprise policy control.
• Azure API Management: strong if you’re deep in Azure; good governance and rate limiting.
• AWS API Gateway + WAF + Shield: effective if you want tight integration with AWS-native security.
• NGINX Plus / F5 / A10: strong for high-performance edge enforcement and traffic control, especially with WAF.

If “attack mitigation” is the main concern

A gateway alone is usually not enough. The best setup is typically:

• API Gateway for auth, quotas, schema validation, throttling
• WAF for injection/XSS/L7 attack filtering
• DDoS protection (Cloudflare, AWS Shield, Akamai, etc.)
• mTLS + partner-specific credentials
• per-partner quotas and anomaly alerts

Practical recommendation

• Need maximum flexibility and security controls: Kong
• Need enterprise API management and analytics: Apigee
• Need cloud-native simplicity: AWS API Gateway + WAF/Shield or Azure APIM + WAF
• Need strongest perimeter/edge protection: pair gateway with Cloudflare or Akamai

If you want, I can give you a short ranked comparison table for Kong vs Apigee vs AWS API Gateway vs Azure APIM specifically for partner API security.