Can an api gateway handle websockets requests besides regular http requests at the same time?

Question

I am working on social platform with a distributed architecture. The platform should offer a chat module, but since the most efficient way to implement a chat is using websockets. I am not sure what part of my architecture should have the websockets server.

Basically, I want my system to have an api gateway component that will route all the requests to the appropriate microservice, I will implement this as a simple http server. But when it comes to handling the chat messages, there has to be a websockets server somewhere in my architecture.

Is it a good design decision to have 2 servers in my api gateway: one http server to handle regular http requests and other websockets server to handle chat specific actions (talking with a peer for example)?

Would it be a better design decision to completly decoulpe the websockets server from the api gateway?

Answer 1

The short answer is - yes. The more complete answer is, yes, but watch out for scalability issues. My advice is anything that requires constant connections (websockets, TCP etc) - split it out of the gateway and call it seperately.