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Infrastructure · Version 1.3.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

API Gateway Policy Advisor

Review and harden policy placement and auth delegation with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 5 documented failure modes 5 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Places authentication, rate limiting, transformation, and routing correctly between gateway and service.

₹149 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Policy placement
  • Auth delegation
  • Transformation limits

How API Gateway Policy Advisor works

You provide

Obligations, data inventory, and current controls

It inspects

Requirement type and implemented control for policy placement

It decides

A auth delegation gap register with accountable owners

You verify

Each control mapped to evidence an auditor would accept

What it checks first

API Gateway Policy Advisor places authentication, rate limiting, transformation, and routing correctly between gateway and service. Use it when the work involves Policy placement, Auth delegation, Transformation limits.

  1. Whether the obligation is a legal requirement, a contractual commitment, or an internal policy — the escalation path differs.
  2. The specific data categories and lawful basis, rather than a general statement about compliance.
  3. Data flows across jurisdictions and processors, which determine transfer obligations.
  4. Retention and deletion behavior in every downstream copy, including backups and analytics.
  5. Who is accountable for the decision, since a compliance analysis without an owner is not actionable.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Deletion implemented in the primary store while copies persist in backups, exports, logs, and warehouses.
  • Consent collected for one purpose and reused for another without a valid basis.
  • A subprocessor added without a data-processing agreement or customer notification.
  • Retention policy defined but never enforced by an automated job.
  • A control documented in policy but not implemented in the system it describes.

Answers it will reject

  • Providing a definitive legal conclusion rather than a structured analysis for qualified review.
  • Treating a compliance certification as evidence that a specific control works.
  • Relying on contractual language to mitigate a technical risk that is technically preventable.
  • Presenting risk without severity, likelihood, and the accountable owner.

Decision rules it applies

  • Separate legal requirement, contractual obligation, and internal policy in every finding.
  • Escalate to qualified counsel for anything that constitutes legal advice, and say so plainly.
  • Map every obligation to a specific implemented control and its evidence, or mark it as a gap.
  • Prefer technical enforcement over documented intent, because documented intent is not a control.

Evidence it asks for

  • Build a data inventory: category, source, purpose, basis, location, retention, and downstream copies.
  • Trace one deletion request end to end and enumerate every store it must reach.
  • Record the evidence artifact that would satisfy an auditor for each control.

The method inside

  1. Map the artifact, actors, boundaries, and invariants relevant to policy placement.
  2. Trace concrete failure or abuse paths for auth delegation; do not report checklist items without a mechanism.
  3. Prioritize transformation limits findings by impact, likelihood, confidence, and cost of correction.
  4. Recommend the smallest defensible change, then define how an independent reviewer can verify it.

Deliverables

  • Policy placement assessment
  • Auth delegation decision and action plan
  • Transformation limits verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Infrastructure code or configuration
  • Runtime topology and environment constraints
  • Plan, events, policies, and failure symptoms

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

How much logic should live in our API gateway? It is starting to contain business rules.

Expected output

Business rules in the gateway become invisible, untested behavior owned by nobody. Keep cross-cutting concerns such as authentication, rate limiting, and routing there, and push anything requiring domain knowledge into the service that owns it...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Policy placement: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Auth delegation: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Transformation limits: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Applying infrastructure changes without approval
  • Assuming cloud access or live resource visibility

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.