#100DaysofAWS | Day 40 | Amazon API Gateway

Jack Lavelle

3 min readOct 1, 2021

Good day everyone!

Today I will be talking all about an extremely powerful service.

Amazon API Gateway!

First of all, what even is an API?

API is not a type of beer, despite sounding like one.

Application programming interfaces, (APIs) simplify software development and innovation by enabling apps to exchange all manners of data and functionality easily and securely. They have revolutionised the way communication takes place on the web, and are used ubiquitously.

One of the chief advantages of APIs is that they allow the abstraction of functionality between one system and another. An API endpoint decouples the consuming application from the infrastructure that provides a service. As long as the specification for what the service provider is delivering to the endpoint remains unchanged, the alterations to the infrastructure behind the endpoint should not be noticed by the applications that rely on that API.

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. APIs act as the “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications.

API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway has no minimum fees or startup costs. You pay for the API calls you receive and the amount of data transferred out and, with the API Gateway tiered pricing model, you can reduce your cost as your API usage scales.

API Gateway supports two different API Types, RESTful APIs, and WEBSOCKET APIs: