What is the primary function of Alibaba Cloud API Gateway?

The primary function of Alibaba Cloud API Gateway is to create and manage APIs securely. This service acts as an intermediary that enables developers to publish, maintain, and protect APIs for their applications. It provides a set of essential tools for authentication, authorization, and traffic management, allowing developers to ensure their APIs are secure and scalable.

API Gateway simplifies the process of integrating different services and enables smoother interactions between various microservices or third-party APIs. By managing APIs centrally, organizations can also monitor usage metrics and apply throttling policies to protect backend services, all while ensuring secure access to their APIs. Thus, the focus on secure creation and management of APIs clearly identifies this option as the correct answer.

The other choices, while relevant to cloud services, do not encapsulate the core purpose of the API Gateway service itself. Storing and retrieving data securely pertains more to database services, traffic analysis relates to monitoring and analytics services, while network performance monitoring focuses on different aspects of network management rather than API management.