APIGEE EDGE and AWS API Gateway +AWS Lambda

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Is APIGEE EDGE and AWS API Gateway+ lambda competing products or can they be complimentary to eachother ?I am interested in knowing the communities perspective on this.

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Even though there are some overlaps in the functionality, IMO they complement each other in providing the best in class technology architecture for enterprise customers. Whether your backend is running on EC2, or using Amazon's latest compute infrastructure - AWS Lambda - you can take advantage of Apigee's Cloud (running on AWS) to get best-in-class performance and maintain rock-solid security.

A couple of weeks ago, Apigee & Amazon co-hosted a webinar and presented a following reference architecture.

2597-aws-diagram-0.png

If you are interested, there is also a doc page on the integration - http://docs.apigee.com/api-services/content/edge-integration-aws

The AWS API gateway covers some of the aspects of API life-cycle including building an API against an existing service, securing it, throttling, monitoring and scaling the infra as and when needed. AWS is extremely good at that. However often times, the enterprise API management needs are different & go beyond the simple gateway functions. In such cases, you need a platform like Apigee Edge covering the end to end life cycle of your APIs. Edge has built in tools to design, develop, secure, deploy & test your APIs. Once developed, the Edge platform helps you publish these APIs to your Developers. These Developers could be in-house app or web-site developers or trusted Partners or even external to your organisation. The platform takes care of on-board these developers, generating keys, managing their profiles, taking care of their QoS & access control requirements. As your APIs continue to evolve, you need to manage multiple API versions, retire legacy services, build new APIs etc. This requires constant monitoring and analysing the usage trends. The sophisticated Analytics component of Edge platform allows you to meter, track health & performance of your APIs. In a few cases you could monetize your APIs as well. The monetization module of Edge will help you there.

To summarise, these two systems complement each other and having a platform like Edge in front of AWS (even non-AWS) backend has a ton advantages.

Hope this helps!

I agree that Apigee's Edge gateway is more robust and feature filled compared to AWS's API gateway and that API Gateway is a good place to start but as your needs evolve and mature Apigee Edge becomes more compelling. What I don't agree with, mostly because I'm not seeing the value, is to say that Apigee Edge + AWS API Gateway are complimentary. If you're using Apigee Edge to proxy an AWS backend (Lambda, EC2, ELB), what's the value add of API Gateway?

IMHO Apigee should be evangelizing patterns of:

  • Apigee Edge -> AWS Lambda
  • Apigee Edge -> AWS EC2
  • Apigee Edge -> AWS ELB

not

  • Apigee Edge -> AWS API Gateway -> AWS Lambda
  • Apigee Edge -> AWS API Gateway -> AWS EC2
  • Apigee Edge -> AWS API Gateway -> AWS ELB

seems like unneeded and duplicated complexity that brings no actual value. Yes, it will work, but why introduce an unnecessary layer for the sake of it. They don't seem to be complimentary at all but more of an either/or.

If I'm missing something, I'm happy to be enlightened.

Yes, the approach is to build a Edge proxy directly on top of Lambda. We have some documentation on this approach - https://docs.apigee.com/api-services/content/create-api-proxies-iam-protected-services