How to proxy an API?

What is the difference between API Gateway and API proxy?

Are they both for free?

Can someone explain? API Gateway is an AWS service which provides a proxy to an application-programming interface. It enables you to use the same programming interface, whether it be HTTP or another protocol. You can then expose it to other applications in a web browser.

API Proxy is a tool for configuring your application to accept requests through a particular proxy. It is used when the backend service needs to be configured to respond to different URL's.

Is an API Gateway just a reverse proxy?

I was introduced to the idea of using an API Gateway for a company I work with, and was told that this would solve our issues with large queries.

Is this just another way of saying that if our queries are large they are going to cause the server or DB to run out of memory? Would putting it behind an API gateway better or is it the same as not putting the large query behind the API gateway in the first place? Are there really any major benefits to having API gateways? Thanks. UPDATE 1: Using a gateway only slows down queries. It does not decrease how often they can take up memory. It only decreases how long the query takes to execute. The gateway increases the latency so the query cannot be sent more than once every 24 hours.

Gateway (as in reverse proxy) will usually make the incoming requests slower and/or queue them. The purpose of these are to handle many incoming HTTP calls in parallel, for example one per user (Rails), or one per request (Express/Koa). They also often include caching (which helps the next HTTP call). This kind of approach is not meant to mitigate resource limitations of your servers/db's capacity. I don't believe there are other benefits, but this approach has been proven effective (although at different scaling levels). You can find a great overview in this post on the topic.

How to proxy an API?

How does one proxy an API with a Python web client?

Specifically I want to build a HTTP client library that works similarly to a browser. The first thing that comes to mind is proxying an API by running something like Apache/modwsgi/etc behind the client. But I wonder what would be the best way to make the request?
Right now, I'm thinking of writing a custom request class that inherits from the built in requests.Request. However, it seems as though there may be more efficient and less boilerplate methods.

The most efficient and easiest way would be just instantiating a requests.Request object. If you want to wrap the socket API, you can just do something like this in your request:

Self.ws = wsapi.ConnectWS(url)
Self.request = Request('GET', url) If you want to wrap the urllib library, you should create an adapter.