Amazon recently announced the general availability (GA) of HTTP APIs in the API Gateway on AWS. With HTTP APIs, the public cloud provider will offer the core functionality of API Gateway REST API handling at a lower price, with the reduction of latency overhead, and increased ease of use.
Based on customer feedback and evaluation from the AWS team working on the AWS API Gateway in early 2019, new investments have been made to evolve the service further. This has resulted in the HTTP APIs for Amazon API Gateway, a new flavor of API Gateway announced at AWS re:Invent 2019 in beta. The beta release had features like JWT authorizers, auto-deploying stages, and simplified route integration. Now that HTTP APIs for Amazon API is GA, including some extra features such as the ability to route requests to private AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), including new support for AWS ALB, and IP-based services registered in AWS CloudMap.
With HTTP APIs customers can build high-performance RESTful APIs that offer up to 71% cost savings and 60% latency reduction compared to REST APIs available from API Gateway. Eric Johnson, a senior developer advocate at AWS, stated in a blog post about the GA release:
With the availability of new technology and the expertise of running API Gateway for almost five years, we built HTTP APIs to run more efficiently.
Besides the efficiency, the HTTP API functionality within the AWS console also received a new user interface to provide users with a more intuitive experience. For instance, when configuring cross-origin resource scripting (CORS), HTTP APIs offers a simple UI to specify all the settings.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-better-apis-http-apis-now-generally-available/
Other new features of the HTTP APIs GA release will allow users to:
- Integrate with resources secured in an Amazon VPC
- Share custom domains across REST APIs and HTTP API
- Provide granular throttling at the stage and route level
- Use stage variables to pass dynamic data to the backend integration or even define the integration itself
Furthermore, HTTP APIs will support an updated event payload (version 2.0) and response format for the Lambda function integration, and the import of Swagger or OpenAPI configuration files.
Michael Gasch, staff engineer at VMware, stated in a tweet:
The next segment AWS is going to disrupt in 2020 - HTTP APIs over time will become the de facto standard for building HTTP/REST APIs on AWS, i.e. it’s not the limited version of AWS Gateway.
Lastly, HTTP APIs is available in all regions where API Gateway is available. Furthermore, pricing details are available on the pricing page under the HTTP APIs section.
