APIs are handy for connecting systems and facilitating data exchange. Of course they are tons of tools available to manage APIs and Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a tool known as the API Gateway for that.
What is AWS API Gateway?
The AWS API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. (e.g. one way to create microservices architecture)
Why AWS API Gateway?
1. Scalability and Performance
AWS API Gateway is designed to handle thousands to millions of concurrent API calls, ensuring your application can scale as demand changes. It reduces the time and effort to manually manage infrastructure and traffic distribution. which means as developers we can focus on building and improving applications more.
2. Security
API Gateway provides several tools to authorize access to your APIs and control service access. These include AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Cognito, and Lambda authorizers for that access management.
3. Cost Efficiency
With API Gateway, you only pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out without upfront costs. The service includes a tiered pricing model that reduces costs as your API usage increases.
4. Development and Operational Efficiency
API Gateway allows for seamless API version management, staging, and lifecycle management. With built-in features (e.g. traffic management, throttling, and backend connection pooling), we can manage our APIs more efficiently.
5. Monitoring and Troubleshooting
With AWS CloudWatch integration, we can monitor API usage and troubleshoot issues more easily. (e.g. with detailed metrics and logging, we can understand how our APIs are being used)
Real-life Example: Online Retail Store
Let’s say you’re developing an e-commerce website “INeedThatFast”. Your website includes numerous services like user management, inventory management, order processing, payment processing, and so on… All these services need to communicate with each other to function correctly.
Instead of allowing these services to communicate directly (which can become a management nightmare!), you can use AWS API Gateway to manage these interactions. This not only ensures secure and efficient communication, but also allows us to monitor and manage these interactions from a single spot.
For example, when a customer places an order, the website interacts with the inventory management and order processing services. API Gateway routes these interactions for us. If the website traffic suddenly increases during a sale event, API Gateway will automatically scale to handle the increased incoming traffic. This allows us to provide a smooth shopping experience for the customers no matter what the website traffic is.
Cheers! 🍺