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Personal project

Warden · API Gateway & Rate Limiter

A lightweight, drop-in API gateway for microservices, with rate limiting, JWT validation, and circuit breaking from a simple YAML config.

Token-bucket + sliding-window limiting

  • Go
  • Redis
  • Docker
req allowed Clients Warden rate-limit · JWT · circuit-break Services Redis shared limits

The idea

Most microservice setups need the same edge concerns: rate limiting, auth, request shaping, and graceful failure. Most reach for a heavyweight gateway to get them. Warden is the opposite bet, a single small reverse proxy you drop in front of your services and configure with one YAML file.

What it does

  • Rate limiting with both token-bucket and sliding-window strategies, backed by Redis so limits hold across replicas.
  • JWT validation at the edge, so services behind it can trust the request.
  • Request and response transformation plus circuit breaker patterns to fail gracefully when a downstream service is unhealthy.
  • Configured entirely through a simple YAML file, with no code changes to add a route or a limit.

Why it matters

It distills the patterns I kept rebuilding in production trading systems, rate control, auth, and circuit breaking, into something small enough to reason about completely.