Why API Gateway?

Using Amazon API Gateway, developers can easily build, publish, maintain, monitor, and defend APIs of any scale. It is available as a public or private cloud service. Data, business logic, and functionality from your backend services are accessible to apps through APIs, which serve as the “front door” to those services.The API Gateway can be used to construct RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that allow for real-time two-way communication applications. Serverless and containerized workloads, as well as web applications and web services, are all supported by API Gateway. In order to accept and handle hundreds of thousands of API calls simultaneously, API Gateway is in charge of all the duties involved. All of the above activities are included in this list, which includes CORS support, authorization (including throttling and monitoring), and API version management. Using API Gateway does not entail any upfront expenditures or a minimum fee. API calls and data transfers are billed separately, and the API Gateway’s tiered pricing allows you to keep your costs as low as possible as your API usage grows.

How it Works

Image sourced from Amazon Web Services

Features

It is simple for developers to publish, maintain, monitor, protect, and run APIs at any scale using the Amazon API Gateway, which is a fully managed service provided by Amazon.This service allows you to pay for it on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it will take care of all of the undifferentiated heavy lifting that is required in order to run APIs in a secure and reliable manner on a wide scale.As a result of the proliferation of mobile devices and the rise of the Internet of Things, it is becoming an increasingly common practice to make backend systems and data accessible to apps through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs). This practice is gaining popularity. A growing amount of time and effort is being spent on the construction and administration of application programming interfaces (APIs) in order to accommodate the large number of apps and communities of developers that rely on APIs. It is possible to construct client SDKs that are compatible with API Gateway using a variety of programming languages. These languages include JavaScript, iOS, and Android. Client software development kits (SDKs) can also be generated by API Gateway for usage in conjunction with other API Gateway services, such as web services.

RESTful and WebSocket API Support

API Gateway gives you the ability to create RESTful APIs by using either HTTP or REST APIs. HTTP APIs ought to be used for the construction of APIs that lack API management functionality. In comparison to REST APIs implemented through API Gateway, serverless HTTP APIs can reduce costs by up to 71 percent and latency by up to 60 percent.Using API Gateway, you may access REST APIs and API management tools such as consumption plans and API keys for your API proxy-enabled applications. Use WebSocket APIs to construct real-time two-way communication apps like chat and streaming dashboards.

Private AWS ELB & Cloud Map integrations

VPC resources can be accessed using API Gateway. If you’d like to build APIs for IP-based services, such as ECS jobs, you can use HTTP APIs.

Resiliency

API Gateway helps you manage traffic by restricting the number of requests per second for each HTTP method in your APIs. By focusing on business logic and services rather than infrastructure, API Gateway frees you from having to worry about it. You can save time by storing your API data in a cache with re-usable keys and a time-to-live in seconds.

Easy API Development

With API Gateway, you can quickly and easily build a custom API to call AWS Lambda functions. Web services having publicly accessible HTTP endpoints such as Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Lambda are all included. In the API Gateway console, you can design and manage your REST API, create client SDKs, and monitor your API metrics.

API Operations Monitoring

API Gateway provides a dashboard for monitoring service calls when an API is implemented. API calls, latency, and errors are all tracked by Amazon CloudWatch via the API Gateway panel. API Gateway APIs can be equipped with custom alerts thanks to CloudWatch’s ability to record monitoring data. API Gateway can record errors in API execution to CloudWatch Logs to aid in debugging.

Authorization from Amazon Web Services

API Gateway can let you authenticate and validate API calls to AWS services using signature version 4 for REST APIs and WebSocket APIs. It is possible to grant access to AWS resources using signature version 4 authentication through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In addition, bearer tokens such as JWT tokens and SAML assertions can be verified and authorized using AWS Lambda functions.

API Keys for External Developers

Using API Gateway, you can keep track of the many third-party developers who are using your REST APIs. Using API Gateway, you may grant specific third-party developers access to your APIs based on permissions you define for each API key. Throttling and request quotas can be established for each API key individually in your plans. This is an optional feature that must be turned on for each technique before it can be used.

Generation of SDKs

To make it easier for you to test new APIs from your apps and to provide SDKs for third-party developers, API Gateway can build client SDKs for a range of platforms. To sign requests and manage API keys in the developed SDKs, AWS credentials are required. API Gateway can produce Ruby and Objective-C/Swift client SDKs for all of the aforementioned platforms. You can use the AWS CLI to develop and download an SDK for a supported platform by using the get-sdk command.