AWS API Gateway is a powerful service for managing your REST APIs. It was released in 2015 as a way to make the newly-released AWS Lambda compute service accessible over HTTPS.
In this post, we'll discuss one of the more advanced API Gateway use cases -- using an AWS service integration to connect HTTP endpoints directly to other AWS services.
I talk to a lot of people who are building REST APIs with AWS Lambda and API Gateway. These tools help them iterate quickly without having to worry about infrastructure.
For those building serverless applications with AWS Lambda and API Gateway, the issue of how to handle authorization is a common question.
The CAP theorem is probably the most popular theorem in computer science. At a very simplified level, failures will happen in a distributed system. When a failure does happen, the CAP theorem says you will need to choose between consistency (clients always read the most recent data) and availability (clients always get a non-error response).
It's fun to dream about building large-scale distributed systems and how you'll handle the difficult choice of availability vs. consistency. Of course you'll choose the cutting-edge database that avoids the CAP theorem entirely (and heck, maybe it solves the P vs NP problem while we're at it)!
Joking aside, I'm going to tell you a little secret -- you shouldn't really care about the CAP theorem.
During my time at Serverless, Inc., I've talked with a lot of users about their serverless applications. One of the persistent questions that people ask is around which database to use.
Many people reach for DynamoDB as their database of choice, with good reason. It's the most serverless-friendly database, for a number of reasons:
The release cadence of AWS is impressive. In 2018, there were 1381 release announcements from AWS on the "What's New" blog feed. At AWS re:Invent 2018, we saw some amazing announcements like a new fully-managed timeseries database, managed Kafka, a whole host of machine learning tools, and even a managed blockchain.
But that's not what this post is about. This post is about the constant, relentless improvements that AWS makes to existing services. Most of these improvements are unseen and unannounced. After all, it's hard to make a release announcement for under-the-hood improvements. Yet these consistent improvements are why AWS continues to delight its customers -- it's never happy with the status quo.