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Learn about a different Cloud product Every Day. We'll explore the opensource software angle of cloud products. What value is the cloud provider adding over that of the project.

AWS Everyday - API Gateway

Is it a proxy or is it a database? Corey Quinn weighs in.

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor)

Dec 14, 2022

I could have spent an hour talking about Application Programming Interface (API) Gateway. As the name implies, it’s a proxy service. API requests come in, and API requests go out. The use cases are pretty amazing. API Gateways can be used as load balancers, reverse proxy servers, security devices, integration points between legacy apps and cloud applications, service mesh, and a database if you listen to Corey Quinn of the Duckbill group.

What’s unique about the AWS API Gateway? It has the scale of the AWS cloud infrastructure and integrates with AWS products. Do you want to build a primary content distribution network? AWS has regional API Gateway endpoints. There’s so much to like about this service. But with great power comes great responsibility. There are many ways to get into billing troubles directly and indirectly due to API Gateway features. We’ll save that for some future conversation.

Is it a Database

A new feature of the newsletter is a rebuttal from Corey.

From Corey

API Gateway has a bunch of AWS service integrations; you don’t need to use Lambda for everything anymore. I like to integrate it with itself, and via some clever routing, you can have an API with a /path/to/your/database/entry laid out as a search tree. Y’know… a database.