API Gateway Features and Charges

Additional features and benefits

API Gateway provides several features that assist with creating and managing APIs.

• Metering: Define plans that meter and restrict third-party developer access to APIs.
• Security: API Gateway provides multiple tools to authorize access to APIs and control service operation access.
• Resiliency: Manage traffic with throttling so that back-end operations can withstand traffic spikes.
• Operations monitoring: API Gateway provides a metrics dashboard to monitor calls to services.
• Lifecycle management: Operate multiple API versions and multiple stages for each version simultaneously so that existing applications can continue to call previous versions after new API versions are published.

API Gateway provides robust, secure, and scalable access to backend APIs and hosts multiple versions and release stages for your APIs. You can create and distribute API Keys to developers. It also provides the option to use AWS Sig-v4 to authorize access to APIs.

You can throttle and monitor requests to protect your backend. Throttling can be configured at multiple levels, including Global and Service Call. Resiliency by using throttling rules based on the number of requests per second for each HTTP method (GET, PUT) is also possible.

More features

• SDK Generation for iOS, Android, and JavaScript
• Reduced latency and distributed denial of service protection through the use of CloudFront
• Request/response data transformation and API mocking.
• Provides Swagger support

API Gateway allows you to maintain a cache to store API responses. A cache can be created and specified in gigabytes (not enabled by default). Caches are provisioned for a specific stage of your APIs. Caching features include customizable keys and time-to-live (TTL) in seconds for your API data, enhancing response times, and reducing the load on back-end services.

API Gateway can scale to any level of traffic received by an API.

Logging and monitoring

The Amazon API Gateway logs (near real-time) back-end performance metrics such as API calls, latency, and error rates to CloudWatch. You can monitor it through the API Gateway dashboard (REST API). The dashboard allows you to monitor calls to the services visually. API Gateway also meters utilization by third-party developers, and the data is available in the API Gateway console and through APIs.

Amazon API Gateway is integrated with AWS CloudTrail to give a full, auditable history of the changes to your REST APIs. All API calls made to the Amazon API Gateway APIs to create, modify, delete, or deploy REST APIs are logged to CloudTrail.