What do you like best about Amazon API Gateway?
Fully managed API management platform designed for building, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs at scale. The service is versatile, supporting RESTful APIs, HTTP APIs, and WebSocket APIs, which makes it suitable for a wide range of use cases, from traditional web applications to real-time communication and serverless workloads.
Key features I appreciate include:
• Traffic Management: API Gateway efficiently handles traffic with built-in load balancing, request throttling, and caching. These capabilities ensure stable performance even under heavy loads.
• Security and Access Control: The platform integrates with AWS IAM, custom authorizers, and Amazon Cognito, offering robust authentication and authorization options. It also supports integration with AWS WAF for advanced request validation and compliance requirements.
• API Versioning and Lifecycle Management: API Gateway enables running multiple versions and stages of an API simultaneously, simplifying the process of rolling out updates and maintaining backward compatibility for clients.
• Observability and Monitoring: Deep integration with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray provides extensive logging, metrics, and tracing, which is crucial for monitoring API health and diagnosing issues.
• Flexible Backend Integrations: The service acts as a unified entry point for various backend systems, including AWS Lambda, EC2, on-premises servers, and other AWS services. This flexibility supports both serverless and traditional architectures.
• Cost Efficiency and Scalability: With no minimum fees and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, API Gateway scales automatically to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, making it cost-effective for both small and large workloads.
• Support for Open Standards: API Gateway supports OpenAPI (Swagger) for import/export, making it easier to define and manage APIs using widely adopted specifications.
• WebSocket and Real-Time APIs: Real-time, two-way communication is supported via WebSocket APIs, useful for building chat apps, live dashboards, and similar applications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Amazon API Gateway?
The primary challenge I encounter with Amazon API Gateway is the complexity of its configuration and learning curve. While the service is feature-rich, mastering its setup, especially when combining advanced features like custom authorizers, usage plans, and detailed monitoring, can be time-consuming. The user interface in the AWS Management Console is dense, and documentation, while comprehensive, sometimes lacks clear, end-to-end examples for complex scenarios.
Additionally, pricing can become unpredictable for high-traffic APIs or those with complex integration and transformation requirements, especially if caching, custom domain names, or advanced security features are enabled. Integrating with legacy systems or non-AWS backends sometimes requires extra configuration or custom Lambda functions, adding to operational overhead. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.