API gateways are key components of many solutions that help to manage, control, secure, monitor, and deploy APIs, allowing communication with your backend applications and microservices running within your infrastructure. There are many variations of API gateways available on the market, but AWS has created its own, known as the AWS API Gateway service.
To see where API gateways fit within your architecture, let’s take a look at a scenario.
Let’s presume you are running a retail e-commerce website and customers from all over the globe can search your website, adding products to their shopping cart before ordering and paying for the items. The architecture supporting your website, to manage the multitude of requests and features on your website, would likely be orchestrated by tens or even hundreds of microservices, all operating independently, carrying out their own function.
For example, you’ll likely have different...