Is it true that an API proxy can act as an API Gateway?

What is the difference between API Gateway and API proxy?

API Gateway is a product by AWS that was originally meant to provide a single-entry-point for your APIs.

It does this by hosting your backend code and providing an interface in front of it. This interface is the API Gateway service, which is a REST API.

API Proxy is a service by AWS that is a gateway to your backend APIs but does not provide the REST interface. Instead, API Proxy provides a client library for your backend, which allows you to create clients to make requests to your backend as if the API Gateway service wasn't there.

You can use both products, but API Gateway is generally the more common choice.

How to use API Gateway as proxy?

I have a Spring Boot API that is supposed to proxy REST calls to an external API.

The external API has a method for logging in which contains some information that I need in the Spring Boot endpoint. I've managed to get it working using the Spring Cloud Config client but I'd like to avoid doing that if possible. What I would like to do is instead of making the external API call directly, to make the request to the Spring Boot endpoint and let it forward the call to the external API. How can I do that? My Spring Boot endpoint currently looks like this: @RestController. @RequestMapping("/"). Public class HomeController.
I'm thinking about adding something like this in the POST request header: Content-Type: application/json. Accept: application/json. X-Auth-Token: And then just use the headers from the request to make a request to the external API. But I'm not sure how to do that.

You can do something like this using Spring Cloud Function. You can write some logic using Java, JS or any language that you want. It is good to note that you should not be using any external libraries to write the code since this is Spring Cloud Function.

You can use HTTP functions to invoke external API. If you want to access the external API from Spring Cloud Function, you need to enable the HTTP function. You can refer to the docs here: You can refer to this blog post for some detailed explanation on how to use the HTTP functions.

Is it true that an API proxy can act as an API Gateway?

An API proxy can only consume your API endpoints and cannot control what requests they send to your backend services.

An API Gateway can perform all the roles of an API proxy as well as additional roles such as: Manage API keys. Associate API keys with OAuth tokens. Respond to requests with custom responses. Rate limit requests. Perform rate limiting. The key difference is that an API proxy is a component that consumes your API endpoints while an API gateway is a component that performs additional functions on top of those endpoints. When you see the term API gateway, it may not be an API proxy.

Is API Gateway a forward proxy?

I'm wondering if API Gateway is a forward proxy?

I'm using AWS with Java/Spring MVC. I'm using @RequestMapping and @ResponseBody to convert the json response.

Yes. You can use it as a forward proxy by setting the X-Forwarded-For header in the response.

In addition, you can get even more metadata by specifying the x-amzn-requestid, x-amz-api-version, and x-amz-apigw-property headers.1", "Transfer-Encoding" : "chunked". "Date" : "Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:46:22 GMT". "Connection" : "keep-alive".
In addition to forward proxies, other services may use another type of proxy to achieve what you want.