APIs act as entry points for applications to access and process data based on business logic or functionality from backend services, such as secured data storage.
The Amazon API Gateway is a managed service for software developers to design, create, maintain, monitor, publish, and secure application programming interfaces (APIs) between a client and a collection of backend services.
While hosting large-scale APIs, you may use authentication and rate-limiting features to protect your APIs from possible abuse or overuse. Analytics and monitoring tools can show how people graphically use your APIs, allowing you to earn revenue from your API.
You could adopt a microservices architecture if you need a single request to call multiple distinct applications.
In this post, we cover how to calculate and optimize your Amazon API Gateway costs:
Amazon API Gateway’s pricing depends on the type of API service offered—HTTP API, REST API, and WebSocket API. A typical use case requires millions, if not billions of calls, making the monthly cost quite variable.
Key inputs for your calculations:
You may trigger data transfer and other costs related to other services on AWS:
Amazon API Gateway’s costs depend on what type of API gateway you selected. You can optimize the charges for API Gateway by selecting the right API gateway. When HTTP API and REST API are compared, AWS HTTP API has limited functionality but is much cheaper when compared to the REST API.
Using AWS service proxy integrations instead of adding a Lambda function to transfer input data from the client would reduce costs as otherwise, you would be paying for your Lambda to run logic that API Gateway could do for free. Amazon API Gateway can be integrated with other AWS services such as DynamoDB, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, with features like API Gateway integration and serverless API gateway service proxy plugin for the serverless framework.
You can remove unnecessary API calls and optimize your system to prevent generating them. The application should be free from redundant and unnecessary API calls that will reduce our costs substantially.
As your application's call volume increases, replace API Gateway with Application Load Balancer (ALB), which internally triggers a Lambda function.
Answer: No, Amazon API Gateway is a pay-per-use service from AWS with a generous free tier that includes 1 million REST API calls, HTTP API calls and messages, and 750,000 connection minutes for free. For most production use cases, this is insufficient. However, attempting to check on the number of products hitting the endpoint can reduce what you’re charged to the bare minimum.
Answer: Amazon API Gateway is the most expensive service in a serverless architecture. However, it depends on how it is used and the type of API Gateway selected. For the first 300 million requests, HTTP API calls are $1 per million and $0.9 per million after that. Compared to HTTP API calls, REST API calls are more expensive, with a price of $3.50 per million requests for the first 333 million requests. If an organization is heavily invested in the AWS stack, securing the back-end services with a native API gateway to secure all the API calls, front-end services, and back-end services might be cheaper.
Answer: Amazon API Gateway in HTTP mode of API calls is the most cost-effective for Lambda-powered HTTP endpoints. It has a very inexpensive pay-as-you-go model. Using other cost-effective gateways (like Kong, Tyk, and Gravitee) may present new challenges if you’re deeply embedded in the AWS ecosystem.
Answer: Amazon API Gateway offers support for RESTful API, REST API, HTTP APIs, and WebSocket APIs.
Answer: HTTP APIs service of Amazon API Gateway comes with standard features that include OIDC, OAuth2, and CORS support for authentication, authorization, and on-stage automatic deployments.
Answer: The usage plan guides you on how to declare a plan for third-party developers restricting access only to specific APIs, define request quota and throttling limits, and share API keys with them. Utilization data can be created per-API key to analyze API usage and billing generation.