Glossary
Route-Level Policy
Route-level policy applies a specific access rule to a particular route or endpoint passing through a gateway, rather than applying one uniform rule across every route behind it. Without this granularity, a gateway's centralization becomes a liability: an endpoint that genuinely needs stricter access than the rest either drags the whole gateway's policy down to the strictest common setting, or gets left exposed at the same laxer level as everything else, because there's no way to differentiate.
This is what lets a gateway serve as a genuine chokepoint for consistent enforcement while still accommodating routes with real, legitimate differences in sensitivity — a public health-check endpoint and an internal administrative one can both sit behind the same gateway with policies matched to what each one actually needs, rather than being forced to share a single setting neither is well suited to.