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AWS API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway is a service that lets developers publish, maintain, monitor and deploy REST, HTTP and WebSocket API's at any scale. Developers can create API's that access other AWS services, third party apps, and data stored within the AWS environment. As such, a common way to use API Gateway is along with AWS Lambda to serve serverless routines and Amazon Cognito to perform authentication under a serverless paradigm.

Architecture​

API Gateway Architecture

Let's discuss the architecture of API Gateway. API Gateway handles all the work of serving concurrent API requests to thousands of customers including traffic management, access management, and security under the hood, so that you as a developer, can only focus on writing the logic for your serverless applications, and not worry about concurrency. More specifically, API Gateway provides a "gateway" to customers to many backend AWS services like EC2 instances running workloads, AWS Lambda running functions, and interfacing with a Content Distribution Network like Amazon CloudFront. With API Gateway, you as a developer can abstract away user interaction with the backend of your application by publishing REST/HTTP API's. This architecture allows for major advances in scalability, concurrency, abstraction, security, and access management and authentication.

Accessing API Gateway​

In order to publish API's using API Gateway, you as a developer must also be able to test and develop them in your local environments. For this prupose, AWS provides multiple access options for developing API's on your local environment:

  1. AWS Management Console: The AWS Management Console is a one-stop solution for interacting with virtually all AWS services. It provides a web interface to publish, develop, and configure API's under API Gateway for those more comfortable with Graphical User Interfaces.
  2. AWS CLI: AWS also provides a command line interface for interacting with all of its services, which is meant to be the command line version of the AWS console, for those who are more comfortable with command line interfaces.
  3. AWS SDK's: AWS also provides Software Development Kits in many popular programming languages like Python, Go, and Java which allow users to develop and interact with AWS services and API Gateway using programming languages. This is particularly important when an AWS service needs to be accessed within some routine in a general purpose programming language codebase.

Once again, this list is not exhaustive, and for more information about these access options, visit Accessing AWS Services

With this, we hope you have a better understanding of API Gateway and integrating it in a serverless paradigm.