An Amazon API Gateway is the AWS service used to manage the APIs in AWS and is used to access the data of a certain application. It creates, publishes, maintains, monitors, and secures the APIs at any scale. The API gateway receives API calls from the clients and then invokes multiple microservices to find the most suitable path for that API.

Let’s discuss the functionality of Amazon API Gateway in detail.

How Does API Gateway Work?

The Amazon API Gateway acts as a traffic controller as it creates a single-entry point for all the API requests. The “clients” (like IoT devices, VPCs, and streaming dashboards) send the “API request” to the applications. There are multiple requests (probably a huge number of requests) at the same time, and the Amazon API Gateway acts as a single-entry point for all the requests. This single-entry point (API gateway) then manages the API call or request and sends it to the applications and “AWS services” associated with those applications:

Benefits of Amazon API

The following are the advantages that the AWS API provides to its customers:

• It centralizes the delivery of AWS services using microservices.
• It helps secure and organize API-based integrations.
• API gateways are highly configurable.
• Users themselves need not change the configurations in case of refactoring or change in the number of resources.
• It reduces the complexity of the process when multiple clients interact with a single application by turning multiple clients’ requests into one request.
• It manages the API in a network in such a way that prevents the overuse of the APIs.

Disadvantages of Amazon API

With the advantages, there are also some drawbacks to using the Amazon API gateway. Let’s discuss some possible disadvantages of API gateway:

• As the API gateway is the single point of entry for all API requests, the failure of the API gateway will lead to the failure of all the requests at once.
• It can increase the latency in the network.
• When different kinds of users (like IOS, android, and Microsoft) send requests at the same time, a single-entry point for all the API requests makes the process complex.

This was a brief discussion about the purpose and working of Amazon API Gateway.

Conclusion

An AWS API gateway is the AWS service that is used to manage the APIs in AWS. This service can manage the API request from multiple clients, being a single-entry point for all the requests, and then finds the best possible path to route the API requests to the applications and AWS Services associated with those applications. This post gave a complete overview of the working and purpose of the AWS API gateway.