API Gateway Configuration, Monitoring, and Optimization

This lesson focuses on configuring Amazon API Gateway endpoints. We explore how developers can use API Gateway to deploy APIs across multiple environments, manage request/response flows, and enforce access control. The lesson is divided evenly between configuration, optimization, and monitoring techniques, each rooted in real-world developer responsibilities.

Configuring API Gateway stages and integrations

API Gateway configurations are key to managing different environments and backend integrations. Stages help separate environments like development and production, while integrations and mappings control how data flows between clients and backends.

Stages and stage variables

Once the API is live, we typically maintain separate environments—like development, staging, and production—to isolate changes. In REST APIs, this is managed using stages and stage variables.

A stage variable is essentially a key-value pair associated with a stage. It allows dynamic configuration without changing the API logic. For example, we can use stage variables to dynamically reference different Lambda aliases in the integration URI. Suppose we want to route requests to different versions of a Lambda function depending on the stage. We define the integration URI like this:

Then we set the alias variable for each ...