Item: Amazon API Gateway
Rating: 8
Author: Ramindu Deshapriya

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Amazon API Gateway to orchestrate and consolidate web service APIs across projects. It is a useful multi-purpose tool, and we use it to integrate authentication to our APIs, build out consolidated responses from different API endpoints, and to provide a single point of access to multiple web service APIs developed using a myriad of different technologies and programming languages. It also provides a great way to document and integrate web services via Swagger integrations.

Pros and Cons

Service orchestration
Response transformations
Authentication and Authorization
Request throttling
Integration with multiple types of web services

Ease of configuration
Easier integration with different AWS network schemes

Return on Investment

Development time for API applications has been reduced by 15%
Issues related to auth reduced by 50%
Velocity of integrating heterogenous API applications has increased by 30-40%

Alternatives Considered

Apigee Edge and SwaggerHub

Our primary architecture is AWS, so we selected [Amazon] API Gateway as our gateway solution. While Apigee and SwaggerHub provide great solutions for service orchestration, [Amazon] API Gateway provided the best integrations with our web services which were mostly running within AWS behind AWS load balancers. [Amazon] API Gateway could also act as a trigger for a set of AWS Lambda functions that we were using for small task APIs.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon API Gateway delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon API Gateway's feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon API Gateway live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon API Gateway go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon API Gateway again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Lucidchart, Postman, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

AWS API Gateway is a solid solution to orchestrate your web services.

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon API Gateway