Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is enhanced platform for developers team to build, Quality testing, arrange and deploy API both restful and websocket based. It provides excellant integration with other services in all kind of enviorments and helps all the different teams in project lofe cycle ranging between dev, QA and UAT.

Experienced a lack of available programming languages while working on a minor project. I had to halt the project and wait for it to be added later. It took ages and had a hit on our productivity. It has a centralized management system which helps and an easy interface which helps to manage multiple tasks in case of large-scale operations and projects.

Amazon API Gateway is powerful service where any organization/team can start developing webs services in less than few hours. It is well suited integration with any other AWS services like Lamda, Cloudwatch etc.. Easy to add authentication layer for web services and deployment with multiple versions. As it is server less, billing is based on usage.

API GW is great for giving access to asynchronous operations that are fast and don't need to be online all the time. Lambda functions are the classic example.

In the past, an operation that is called on via an HTTP endpoint would be implemented using a server-based solution. With high availability in place that would include a server or two and a load balancer. Over time this setup can be costly, especially if the service is not used at full capacity; cycles are wasted when the servers are sitting there waiting to respond.

If the operation can be distilled down to a function, an API GW + Lambda solution could be put in place that performs the operation as needed only when requested. Comparing the low price point for API GW requests and Lambda CPU+Memory, the savings can be night and day over the server-based implementation.

We needed a tool that aggregates the APIs, allowing central control, and at the same time reducing the delivery time of the solutions, without worrying about scalability or security. This solution solved these points in a very simple way, giving us even more security (simple things like putting a certificate in front, it delivers for free), and connecting to the services we already used within AWS.

If you are using AWS as your primary infrastructure provider, [Amazon] API Gateway is the best gateway option for you to integrate and expose web service applications. It integrates well with security controls provided by AWS such as VPC limits and security groups. Furthermore, it is very easy to use Amazon API Gateway to provide an out-of-the-box auth solution by integrating AWS Cognito. We were able to get authentication and authorization integrated very quickly in to a large number of APIs under the same product umbrella by utilizing API Gateway's integration with Cognito.
[Amazon] API Gateway is not the best solution if you're trying to build a microservices architecture, as it's service registration methodology is still quite clunky. For microservices, you'd be better off utilizing tools built specifically for that purpose.

It is great if you want to have a single point of entry that is scalable and has redundancy but be prepared to spend days not being able to figure out what the problem is and how to solve it. Errors are not very descriptive, it lacks documentation to explain the basic flow of data in this service, and troubleshooting issues especially CORS is a nightmare. Until we hired AWS Developer to have a 2-day session to go through this service and how to set it up and use it, it was just a nightmare. And even after having a session they still did not explain all the features and setup, they pointed us to documentation, but documentation is not very well written.

I think if your software is suitable for event-based architecture, and if you can use Lambda in your architecture, API Gateway is a must and complementary product to use. It provides you tools that you can use to build very scalable and secured endpoints. In my company, we have divided our software into domains and created API Gateway instances for each domain connected to our AWS Lambdas. This provided us better and well-organized APIs which we provide to our customers. The feedback we've received from customers is very positive, and they think that our APIs are well designed and look professional.

Amazon API Gateway is a very powerful tool, for a small organization. Good for quick developing microservices . It is also great when used as a API gateway that provides authentication over microservices.

It is best suited for building out the APIs for a serverless backend. It may not be the best option for Mobile backends, in which case AWS AppSync would be preferred over API Gateway.

Amazon AWS services, including the API Gateway, have an excellent reputation in the development community. They have one of the best up-times for any comparable cloud hosting service. The fact that the service scales up as the load requirements increase, and that clients are only charged based on these usage metrics, makes it a winner for us.

Amazon API Gateway is a very powerful tool, particularly for small engineering teams. It is ideal for rapidly developing microservices when used in conjunction with the Serverless framework and AWS Lambda. It is also great when used as a conventional API gateway that provides authentication and routing over microservices. It would not be useful for exposing a monolithic application.