An API gateway serves as a modern infrastructure component that facilitates communication between clients and services by acting as a single entry point, thus enhancing the management and orchestration of microservices. Unlike Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs), which can become complex and monolithic, API gateways offer a decentralized, focused approach to connectivity, allowing for better scalability, flexibility, and management of cross-cutting concerns like authentication and logging. They support a design-first API development approach, promoting API adoption through discoverability and documentation while enabling performance improvements by aggregating multiple backend API calls into single client interactions. As organizations transition from monolithic to microservice architectures, API gateways can coexist with ESBs to gradually decouple business logic and foster agility, adapting to cloud or hybrid environments. By focusing on API connectivity, enterprises can unlock new value, leveraging the gateway's capabilities to create a more customer-centric and agile technological landscape.