What is our primary use case?
We are dealing more with Amazon these days, primarily because AWS, being a cloud service provider, offers many services on both the data side and the services side. We are using a few services of AWS, including data pipelines.
The tools by Amazon that we work with mostly include EC2, which is the first and foremost compute service we use a lot, as it serves as the prime backbone of any computations in enterprise systems. For data systems, we generally take S3 as the primary and primitive data lake, and we also use API services, Redshift, EMR, SageMaker, and Athena based on customer solutions.
We are working with Amazon API Gateway, mostly using it with Lambda services.
What is most valuable?
Regarding built-in authorization, monitoring is quite substantial, and versioning systems is also what we are using. With Amazon API Gateway, we utilize a variety of deployment methods and services they provide, so monitoring services are the important parameter in API control from our side, allowing us to see how the APIs behave and how well they pick up the data from their respective sources.
Integration with AWS Lambda has been beneficial since we have event controllers that help identify the APIs, which then call the API from the API services. We're managing this with events that are parameterized through API identification, mostly using Python in Lambda, which has inbuilt features to track API lifecycle parameters.
The defined parameterized features in Amazon API Gateway help streamline API lifecycle management. Our AWS system admin team sets these configurations for us. The versioning number gets updated as we deploy revised API versions, which gets monitored on the API monitoring services. The cloud engineering team assists us as we are from a solutions development and deployment team.
The importance of Amazon API Gateway's global API deployment for our application's performance is significant in terms of scalability and availability. Amazon API Gateway services have been very good, maintaining a 99.99 SLA, providing us confidence in the global deployment level as it is capable of handling various endpoint types, such as database sites and legacy systems.
What needs improvement?
If you ask what I would improve in Amazon API Gateway, I would suggest the need for an audit trail based on user credentials.
An audit trail and audit stamps managed at the API level to control API movement would be beneficial. With many AI solutions emerging that determine who is calling the API and whether authorization or need is present, having that integrated into Amazon API Gateway services would be a great improvement.
As of now, the audit trail is the main point I truly think would significantly improve the API services.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started working with Amazon API Gateway at least six years back, around 2019-2020. Of late, because we have also moved into Azure services and are significantly into AI solutions, I see a slight reduction in our consumption of Amazon API Gateway over the past year. However, I have been working with the gateway services for some time now.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate technical support at around 8.5 to 9 on a scale of one to ten. The professional services from AWS have been good, and although there may have been some communication issues, that might have been on our side as we didn't require much support due to well-maintained SLAs.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before using Amazon API Gateway, I did not work with anything similar in a cloud environment. However, I used APIs for many years in my lifetime, primarily through method calls integrated with RPC protocols.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup of Amazon API Gateway is straightforward. Compared to the old days of creating our own gateway services and connecting with RPC or UPI protocols, Amazon API Gateway is a self-contained solution, and it works well.
What other advice do I have?
You can proceed with your questions about Amazon API Gateway, and I will try to answer if I have the knowledge. Regarding pricing, I think it is reasonable considering the kind of work it does for us. Overall, I would rate Amazon API Gateway as a product a nine because I appreciate that product. My overall review rating for this product is nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)