Monitoring platform for keeping systems up and running at all times.
Full stack visibility across the entire stack.
Detect and resolve any incident in record time.
Conform to industry best practices.
AWS API Gateway is a completely managed service that makes developers’ job much easier by allowing them to publish, create, monitor, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale.
In today’s article, we’ll talk more about API Gateway What is it, why is it so important, as well as how it can help us with?
When it comes to Amazon Web Services, as we’ve already mentioned, API Gateway service allows developers to monitor, maintain, create, and publish APIs at any scale by merely pressing a few buttons in the AWS Management Console. Therefore, you’ll create REST and WebSocket APIs that will act as a front door for applications to get access to data. The applications will then have open access to the data, business logic or even functionality from your backend services like workloads running on Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and any other web application, or even a real-time communication application.
If you wish to know how much your AWS API Gateway will cost you, we at Dashbird have made the API Gateway calculator. Use it to calculate the potential cost of your API Gateway service utilization.
APIs are the force that drives in the background of numerous applications regardless of their size. If you’re publishing a public API or building an integrations marketplace, APIs are the way to do the business.
It is similar to when the web era had HTTP servers to serve the websites in production; APIs have API Gateways to serve APIs in production. We can use API Gateways to assist in the delivery of API with high availability in mind to your partners and customers.
API Gateways are a type of proxy which sits in front of your APIs and the features it has include task performance like authentication, security policies enforcements, routing publicly accessible endpoints to the appropriate microservice, rate limiting, load balancing across multiple internal services, as well as numerous other features.
Another way to look at it is that API Gateway is a reverse proxy which exposes the microservices as APIs. As its name implies, API Gateway is a “gatekeeper” between the microservices and clients.
Companies that use API Gateway will benefit from a complexity reduction in their client and server code, which is a more manageable way to impose limits and enforce access. Occasionally, it provides an overall network latency reduction, which is required to satisfy the client’s requests.
Considering that the client and backend services are decoupled, there’s no need for the client to realize how the individual services have been decomposed. The decoupling makes it much easier to refactor services without one code base impacting another.
With API Gateways there’s no need for developers to build logic into their apps which are supposed to keep track of endpoints or even how to handle request failures, and all to avoid the delivery of a bad user’s experience. Another benefit API Gateway provides the minimization of latency, which, ultimately, brings a better end-user experience.
Without API Gateway, every backend service would need to create its own security-related logic about every incoming client request. So one big benefit is that it can simplify encryption and authentication as well.
The list above is just the example of some of the best API Gateways, but many more exist along with the highly specialized ones as well. Akamai, Microsoft, Google/Apigee, Dell Boomi, and many other companies offer their own API Gateway services too.
Wrapping Up
API Gateways essentially help in minimizing the possibility of data sources exposure as well as backend services exposure directly to the clients. By using API Gateways, you’ll have a cleaner and simpler client code, less latency involved, along with the simplified authentication and encryption.
What are your experiences in using API Gateways? Do you have thoughts you’d like to share with our readers? Leave them in the comment section below.
Today we are announcing a new, updated pricing model and the end of free tier for Dashbird.
In this article, we’re covering 4 tips for AWS Lambda optimization for production. Covering error handling, memory provisioning, monitoring, performance, and more.
In this article we’ll go through the ins and outs of AWS Lambda pricing model, how it works, what additional charges you might be looking at and what’s in the fine print.
Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.
Dashbird gives us a simple and easy to use tool to have peace of mind and know that all of our Serverless functions are running correctly. We are instantly aware now if there’s a problem. We love the fact that we have enough information in the Slack notification itself to take appropriate action immediately and know exactly where the issue occurred.
Thanks to Dashbird the time to discover the occurrence of an issue reduced from 2-4 hours to a matter of seconds or minutes. It also means that hundreds of dollars are saved every month.
Great onboarding: it takes just a couple of minutes to connect an AWS account to an organization in Dashbird. The UI is clean and gives a good overview of what is happening with the Lambdas and API Gateways in the account.
I mean, it is just extremely time-saving. It’s so efficient! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration or dramatic to say that Dashbird has been a lifesaver for us.
Dashbird provides an easier interface to monitor and debug problems with our Lambdas. Relevant logs are simple to find and view. Dashbird’s support has been good, and they take product suggestions with grace.
Great UI. Easy to navigate through CloudWatch logs. Simple setup.
Dashbird helped us refine the size of our Lambdas, resulting in significantly reduced costs. We have Dashbird alert us in seconds via email when any of our functions behaves abnormally. Their app immediately makes the cause and severity of errors obvious.