Thanks to technology, you don’t need to memorise nor compute. Both of these things have been delegated to computers. Our jobs are to design solutions and let computers do the hard part. In the world of API development, there have been numerous API frameworks that allow us to develop APIs and apply all kinds of filters and configurations on top of it.
But, as we integrate APIs across multiple systems, the challenge of design still exists. Application developers, designers and architects need to design an efficient API for everyone to consume.
The API should also be designed as such it orchestrates minimum efforts and returns effective results in time. Non-functional aspects of API design like security and performance are largely taken care by frameworks and nowadays by low-code design systems. But they come in the realm of API design.
AWS boasts of an extraordinary feature when it comes to API development - Amazon API Gateway.
The Amazon API Gateway enables you to create APIs that allow you to access web services like AWS as well as Cloud data (data stored on any cloud). You can create, publish & monitor APIs using the gateway in your own client applications or pass on the APIs to third party app developers
Three Major APIs supported by API Gateway are:
API Gateway REST API
This consists of a pool of HTTP resources and methods. They are integrated with Lambda functions, HTTP endpoints & other web services. Deployment can happen in one or more stages
API Gateway HTTP API
This consists of a pool of routes and methods. They are integrated with HTTP endpoints or Lambda functions. Deployment can happen in one or more stages
API Gateway WebSocket API
This consists of a pool of WebSocket routes and route keys. They are integrated with HTTP endpoints Lambda functions, or other AWS services. Deployment can happen in one or more stages
One of the most commonly used features of AWS API Gateway is building a REST API Gateway with Lambda Integration
Lambda Integration or Lambda Proxy Integration is the integration of an API method with a Lambda Function. The function can be written in different language like Node.js, Python, Java, .NET 6.
How to Build a Hello World Program REST API with Lambda Proxy Integration
Let us take another example of an online retail store to demonstrate the concept of how the API can be created to access the retail website.
You can use the Amazon API Gateway Console to create an API so that a client can access the HTTP backend website of the retail store.
The HTTP link to the backend website is as follows:
http://retailstore-demo-endpoint.execute-api.com/retailstore/retailThe following methods are available for the following to the following queries:
GET/: for read access to get the overview of website
GET/retail: for read access to the API’s or retail resource specific page meaning specific item
POST/retail: for write access to the APIs
GET/retail/{retailID}: for read access to retail variable retailIDYou can refer to aws apigateway & below image for more details:
Amazon CloudFront is another web service by Amazon which accelerates the process of distribution of static & dynamic content to the users. CloudFront as the name suggests is located at the front edge in the cloud system architecture. If the content is available at the edge, the transfer of data happens with low latency. If the content is not available at the edge server, CloudFront retrieves the data from an origin that is predefined. Refer below diagram for better clarity:
Amazon boasts of a plethora of AWS. Explore more
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