API Gateway Overview

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on EC2, code running on AWS Lambda, or any Web application.

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Benefits of API Gateway (based on Amazon docs)

1. Low-Cost and Efficient

2. Performance at Any Scale

3. Easily Monitor API Activity

   1. After your API is deployed, Amazon API Gateway provides you with a dashboard to visually monitor calls to your services using Amazon CloudWatch.

4. Streamline API Development

   1. Amazon API Gateway lets you simultaneously run multiple versions of the same API.

5. Flexible Security Controls

   1. API Gateway provides you with tools to authorize access to your APIs and control service operation access.

6. Create RESTful Endpoints for Existing Services.

7. Run Your APIs Without Servers

   1. Amazon API Gateway tightly integrates with AWS Lambda to allow you to create completely server-less APIs.

API Gateway Pricing

Amazon API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay only for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out.

Caching

For better performance and faster API execution, you can optionally provision a dedicated cache for each stage of your APIs.

After you specify the size of the cache you require, you will be charged the following hourly rates for each stage’s cache, without any long-term commitments.