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You can use [Edge Microgateway](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/microgateway/edge-microgateway-home) to provide Apigee API management for
services running in a [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/docs/home) cluster.
This topic explains why you might want
to deploy Edge Microgateway on Kubernetes, and it describes how to deploy
Edge Microgateway to Kubernetes as a service.

> [!CAUTION]
> **NOTE:** Running Edge Microgateway in Kubernetes using the sidecar proxy pattern is supported; however, the `edgemicroctl` and related tooling described in [Deploy Edge
> Microgateway as a sidecar proxy](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/integrations/kubernetes/k8s-sidecar) is deprecated. This tooling relies on the Istio sidecar injector, which is no longer supported.

## Use case

Services deployed to Kubernetes commonly expose APIs, either to external
consumers or to other services running within the cluster.

In either case, there is an important problem to solve: How will you manage
these APIs? For example:

- How will you secure them?
- How will you manage traffic?
- How will you gain insight into traffic patterns, latencies, and errors?
- How will you publish your APIs so developers can discover and use them?

Whether you are migrating existing services and APIs to the Kubernetes stack or
are creating new services and APIs, Edge Microgateway helps provide a clean API
management experience that includes security, traffic management, analytics, publishing, and
more.

## Running Edge Microgateway as a service

When deployed to Kubernetes as a service, Edge Microgateway runs in its own [pod](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/pod/).
In this architecture, Edge Microgateway intercepts incoming API
calls and routes them to one or more target services running in other pods.
In this configuration, Edge Microgateway provides API management features such
as security, analytics, traffic management, and policy enforcement to the other
services.

The following figure illustrates the architecture where Edge
Microgateway runs as a service in a Kubernetes cluster:

![Edgemicro as Service](https://docs.apigee.com/static/api-platform/images/em-k8s-service-arch.png)

See [Deploy Edge Microgateway as a service in Kubernetes](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/integrations/kubernetes/k8s-service).

## Next step

- To learn how to run Edge Microgateway as a service in Kubernetes, see [Deploy
  Edge Microgateway as a service in Kubernetes](https://docs.apigee.com/api-platform/integrations/kubernetes/k8s-service).