AWS API Gateway introduction

API Gateway from Amazon Web Services is a fantastic tool with a slew of features that significantly simplifies implementation of an API proxy pattern. Later on in the chapter, we'll discuss strategies when building on a different cloud provider; however, if you're like me and use AWS consistently, API Gateway can make your life much more comfortable. Personally, I feel that it's an underrated tool, which can do a lot more than HTTP requests to Lambda functions as we saw in Chapter 2, Three-Tier Web Application Using REST and Chapter 3, Three-Tier Web Application Pattern with GraphQL.

The first question may be, What is API Gateway and what does it do? Rather than answer this myself, I'll defer to the technical documentation at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/welcome.html, which does a good job of describing Gateway at a high level:

"Amazon API Gateway is an AWS service that enables developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and...