Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that enables developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. It acts as the "front door" for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from backend services. With API Gateway, you can build RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that support real-time two-way communication applications. The service is designed to handle the heavy lifting involved in processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including tasks such as traffic management, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications, and offers developer portals to centrally discover, document, and govern your REST APIs across your AWS infrastructure. Key Features and Functionality: - Efficient API Development: Run multiple versions of the same API simultaneously, allowing for quick iteration, testing, and release of new versions. - Performance at Any Scale: Leverage a global network of edge locations using Amazon CloudFront to provide low-latency API requests and responses. - Cost Savings at Scale: Benefit from a tiered pricing model that reduces costs as API usage increases, with prices as low as $0.90 per million requests at the highest tier. - Easy Monitoring: Monitor performance metrics, including API calls, data latency, and error rates, through the API Gateway dashboard integrated with Amazon CloudWatch. - Flexible Security Controls: Authorize access to APIs using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Cognito, with support for OAuth tokens and custom authorization requirements via AWS Lambda authorizers. - RESTful API Options: Create RESTful APIs using HTTP APIs or REST APIs, with HTTP APIs being up to 71% cheaper than REST APIs for most use cases. Primary Value and Problem Solved: Amazon API Gateway simplifies the process of building and managing APIs by handling the complexities of API development, including traffic management, security, monitoring, and version control. It enables developers to focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. By providing a scalable, cost-effective, and secure platform for API management, API Gateway helps organizations efficiently connect their applications to backend services, ensuring high performance and reliability.