Item: Amazon API Gateway
Rating: 3
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon API Gateway is used to migrate existing legacy apps and to create new apps based on the latest department initiatives. It is allowing us to generate more "generic" APIs that can be easily shared across different applications and it is easier to develop with lambda behind it. We are now moving more and more towards cloud and serverless and this perfectly fit our needs.

Pros and Cons

Easy to create.
Easy to deploy.
Easy to integrate with other AWS services/products.

It is not as simple as they claim it is.
CORS is never explained in details how it works on Amazon API Gateway.
It needs better documentation.

Return on Investment

ROI is negative, you need either to hire them to work with you or spend days/weeks to figure out issues.
For some of the projects in the end it is not worth it, it is just a "buzz" to use serverless but not practical.
Service is easy to set up authorization and it is easy to manage.

Alternatives Considered

Azure API Management and Talend Data Integration

Compared to other solutions, Azure is much easier to use and setup, but probably for hybrid solution Talend API in the cloud is the best solution and Talend API can take advantage of Amazon API Gateway, thus all this hard work is done by other software solution. Additionally, Talend API integrates better with on-prem solutions compared to Amazon API Gateway. Most companies that have been historically on-prem will be hard to simply integrate with the latest and the greatest technology in AWS. AWS was more design for companies starting from scratch and they always tell you "oh that is easy to integrate, no problem, 5 minutes, 3 clicks...", but in the end, it is another sales pitch because they don't know/understand on-prem environments.

Key Insights

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

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

Yes

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

Did implementation of Amazon API Gateway go as expected?

Would you buy Amazon API Gateway again?

Other Software Used

AWS Lambda, Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS), Flutter, by Google

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

It is not as easy to integrate as they tell you

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon API Gateway