Why use a proxy with an API Gateway?

How do I add a proxy to my API Gateway?

In my API Gateway I want to add a Proxy to a specific API Version.

In the first place I try to add a new API. This can be done from the GUI. The problem here is, that when I add this new API, I cannot assign it to a version. I get the following message:

The API Gateway is not currently assigned to a version. Please assign it to a version before editing APIs and API versions.

I want to add the proxy to a version without changing the version (as in edit the version, but leave the existing version). Is this possible? Update: My version was already assigned to an API. I want to add the proxy to this version. But this is not possible. So I have two questions:

Can I add a proxy to an existing version? Can I add a new API without assigning it to a version? I created an API on a version, but I would like to assign it to a specific version without creating a new version. There's no way to add a proxy to an existing version of an API Gateway resource. An API Gateway resource can only have one version at a time, regardless of whether it has a proxy.

What is a proxy in API Gateway?

A Proxy enables us to control and validate the URL's we have our API requests on.

It is very useful when working with external services, because it allows us to secure access for third-party apps without using basic CORS support. This way, only authorized requests can have access to our APIs.

Proxy is a component provided in all of our products. It is part of our Lambda integration as well, which allows us to run proxies from API Gateway. To get started, we need to create an integration. Here, we will use cURL request. In order to send those, we need an accessKey first. You can create these keys from the AWS console, or do it here for us.

Creating an integration. API Gateway is configured in a way that it has a proxy to integrate with Lambda directly through a custom HTTP protocol. You do not need to know anything else about how it works, besides making requests to API Gateway. It provides all needed parameters for requests. This lets you focus on writing your own logic.

In AWS console, choose Create New to find an option named Custom http methods and paths, where you can specify curl request and specify proxy with credentials to a remote server. When creating it first time, you may see something like this.

Proxy settings. The main thing to understand here, is how we are using a proxy through API gateway. I'm not going to repeat the whole article since it is very detailed, so I suggest you to follow it instead. We won't be looking at it much either. Instead, you should notice that here I'm using a username of: api-cust-proxy-username . If you check the proxy settings, you may see the following.

Setting proxy credentials from API Gateway. At some point, we created an Integration. You will see the proxy settings there.

Now we need to specify a CORS header we received from External Application so that browsers handle our request correctly. You might think that everything is configured but I'm going to show you the full example of setting this in the Integration settings, in case something went wrong.

Setting CORS headers for proxy. Next you need to specify what headers we want from the request. In my case I would specify Content-Type. I will leave it up to your discretion.

Why use a proxy with an API Gateway?

Imagine a scenario where you have two different backends that are both valid for a particular path.

Your backend uses the S3 storage and one of your backend APIs should use the DynamoDB backend.

You would need to set up an endpoint for each backends which will do the conversion for you. But you'll end up with one unnecessary server serving the same request.

API Gateway is an AWS service that allows you to create proxy endpoints that do some basic conversion between the data and the API endpoint. For example, if the incoming request is a form POST, API Gateway will make sure that the body is serialized and sent to the appropriate endpoint.

Why use API Gateway? You don't have to maintain multiple servers and endpoints. You only need to keep one API Gateway in the same region as the server that serves your requests.

The API Gateway can do the authentication for you, based on user roles. What should I use API Gateway for? Creating Lambda functions that are public and only accessible by authenticated users. These Lambdas have a public URL.

Create a single backend, but expose different endpoints to different audiences, for example, one for the public audience, another for the authenticated audience, or perhaps one for your development team and another for the frontend developers. A Lambda that is publicly accessible, but the API Gateway proxy the requests to other API endpoints that are private. Your own API that your backend services use. If you only need one endpoint, go with the Serverless Framework. If you want more than one endpoint, API Gateway it is.

What is the difference between API Gateway and AWS API Server? AWS API Server is a proxy endpoint. It allows you to proxy any HTTP request from the browser to an external backend (in this case, it would be your API). The backend could be on Amazon's cloud or anywhere else.

API Gateway is a proxy endpoint that allows you to define multiple APIs (endpoints) and can convert incoming requests to one of the APIs. It works like a router that routes the requests to your APIs.

API Gateway handles the request validation, rate limiting, caching, and authorization.

How do I use AWS API Gateway as proxy?

I'm using AWS API gateway and would like to use it as a proxy for my webhook API.

For testing purposes I want to configure one of the services, say an S3 bucket, as a resource. When I test this from my local PC, I would be using localhost:8000 as the URL to the S3 service - how do I change this to point to my API gateway? I haven't been able to find any clear answers for this. I thought it might be done using CORS headers, so tried setting them, but this has also failed me. Does anybody have any information on how to achieve this?
I've done it in the past with Node.js app. But now I am not doing it because Lambda takes care of these things by itself.

You can set Lambda Proxy to point to your API Gateway using following Lambda proxy setting.