A Powerful Tool for Developing Micro-Services Rapidly
January 09, 2019
A Powerful Tool for Developing Micro-Services Rapidly
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon API Gateway
We use Amazon API Gateway in conjunction with AWS Lambda functions and the Serverless framework to rapidly build microservices. This combination is very powerful, particularly for small development teams, because it allows us to delegate work to AWS; we can focus our development effort only on features that yield competitive advantages for our business.
- API Gateway integrates well with AWS Lambda. This allows us to build a web server in the language and framework of our choice, deploy it as a Lambda function, and expose it through API Gateway.
- API Gateway manages API keys. Building rate limiting and request quota features are not trivial (or interesting).
- API Gateway's pricing can be very attractive for services that are accessed infrequently.
- API Gateway introduces some concepts, such as Stages and Integration Requests, that are foreign to most developers. The documentation hints in the Console help, but sometimes these concepts are not transferred to frameworks like Serverless.
- Systems that use API Gateway may behave differently in end-to-end tests in local or CI environments.
- Navigating the Console can be confusing.
- It could be easier to codify API Gateway configurations.
- API Gateway has positively impacted our business by increasing the stability of our services. It is easy to implement rate limiting and horizontal scaling with API Gateway; this helps us to deliver highly-available services.
- API Gateway has increased our developer's productivity because they can delegate the management of web services to AWS. They can focus on features instead of Nginx configurations.
- API Gateway makes access control easy, which makes securing our services easier.
Nginx is a powerful tool but configuring, running and maintaining but Nginx will never be a competitive advantage for our business. API Gateway is powerful because it is managed and does what we need out-of-the-box. Nginx is used more widely in the community; it may be easier to find developers with Nginx experience.