AWS: API, Dynamo and Lambda

Readings

AWS API Gateway Overview

• What is Amazon API Gateway?

  • a managed service that allows developers to define the HTTP endpoints of a REST API or a WebSocket API and connect those endpoints with the corresponding backend business logic.

• Why is Amazon API Gateway an important part of the Serverless ecosystem?

  • it enables a truly serverless architecture for web applications. When using API Gateway together with other AWS services, it’s possible to build a fully functional customer-facing web application without maintaining a single server yourself.

• How does API Gateway integrate with other AWS services?

  • These integrations allow for fully managed authentication and authorization layers, as well as detailed metrics and tracing for API requests.

AWS API Gateway

• What are the some benefits of using Amazon API Gateway?

  • Efficient API development

    • Run multiple versions of the same API simultaneously with API Gateway, allowing you to quickly iterate, test, and release new versions. You pay for calls made to your APIs and data transfer out and there are no minimum fees or upfront commitments.

  • Performance at any scale

    • Provide end users with the lowest possible latency for API requests and responses by taking advantage of our global network of edge locations using Amazon CloudFront. Throttle traffic and authorize API calls to ensure that backend operations withstand traffic spikes and backend systems are not unnecessarily called.

  • Cost savings at scale

    • API Gateway provides a tiered pricing model for API requests. With an API Requests price as low as $0.90 per million requests at the highest tier, you can decrease your costs as your API usage increases per region across your AWS accounts.

  • Easy monitoring

    • Monitor performance metrics and information on API calls, data latency, and error rates from the API Gateway dashboard, which allows you to visually monitor calls to your services using Amazon CloudWatch.

  • Flexible security controls

    • Authorize access to your APIs with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Cognito. If you use OAuth tokens, API Gateway offers native OIDC and OAuth2 support. To support custom authorization requirements, you can execute a Lambda authorizer from AWS Lambda.

  • RESTful API options

    • Create RESTful APIs using HTTP APIs or REST APIs. HTTP APIs are the best way to build APIs for a majority of use cases—they’re up to 71% cheaper than REST APIs. If your use case requires API proxy functionality and management features in a single solution, you can use REST APIs.

• What two API types might you choose from?

  • RESTful API/WEBSOCKET API

AWS DynamoDB Guide

• What is DynamoDB?

  • a hosted NoSQL database offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Under what circumstances would you recommend DynamoDB over MongoDB?

  • Applications with large amounts of data and strict latency requirements, Serverless applications using AWS Lambda, Data sets with simple, known access patterns

AWS DynamoDB

• Explain to a non-technical friend how DynamoDB works.

  • one stop shop batabase that offers built in security, continuous backups, automated multi-region replication

Dynamoose

• What is Dynamoose?

  • a modeling tool for Amazon’s DynamoDB. Dynamoose is heavily inspired by Mongoose, which means if you are coming from Mongoose the syntax will be very familiar

• What are some key features of Dynamoose?

  • Type safety
  • High level API
  • Easy to use syntax
  • DynamoDB Single Table Design Support
  • Ability to transform data before saving or retrieving items
  • Strict data modeling (validation, required attributes, and more)
  • Support for DynamoDB Transactions
  • Powerful Conditional/Filtering Support
  • Callback & Promise support
  • AWS Multi-region support