Lambdas with API Gateway

For modern, serverless architectures, the combination of AWS Lambda with Amazon API Gateway is ideal. This approach allows you to create highly scalable and cost-effective applications, as you only pay for the compute time consumed. It's the perfect choice for APIs, microservices, and dynamic web applications that require agility and efficiency.

AWS Lambda is the service that runs your code in response to events, without the need to provision or manage servers. Simply upload your code – whether in Node.js, Python, Java, or other languages – and Lambda takes care of everything. It manages compute capacity, scalability, and fault tolerance, allowing you to focus solely on the logic of your application.

With Lambda, you have the flexibility of:

• Pay-per-use: You only pay for the compute time consumed by your code, measured in milliseconds. No costs when your application is not in use.
• Automatic scalability: Lambda scales automatically, dozens or hundreds of times per second, to handle traffic spikes with no manual intervention.
• Integration with events: Runs your code in response to a wide range of AWS events, such as uploads to S3, updates to DynamoDB tables, and, of course, HTTP requests from the API Gateway.

Your business logic runs in lightweight, ephemeral Lambda functions. But how do you expose these functions to the outside world, turning them into an API accessible over the internet? That's where Amazon API Gateway comes in.

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that simplifies the creation, publication, maintenance, monitoring, and protection of APIs at scale. It acts as a "proxy" for your Lambda functions, converting HTTP requests into events that trigger the Lambda code, and then formatting the response for the client.

• Complete management: It handles routing, authentication, authorization, and API versioning.
• Performance and latency: It offers caches to reduce latency and the number of calls to your Lambda functions.
• API protection: It allows for easy configuration of API keys, access control, and protection against DDoS attacks.

How does the API Gateway help your architecture?

Combining AWS Lambda with Amazon API Gateway is the best strategy for building modern, robust, and highly scalable web applications and APIs, taking full advantage of the AWS serverless model.

• Cost efficiency: You only pay for requests and execution time, eliminating costs for idle servers.
• Unlimited scalability: The architecture scales up and down transparently, handling any volume of traffic.
• Agile development: It allows developers to focus on the application code, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
• Reduced maintenance: AWS manages the infrastructure, reducing the maintenance and patching workload.