Creating a REST API in Amazon API Gateway

In Amazon API Gateway, you build a REST API as a collection of programmable entities known as API Gateway resources. For example, you use a RestApi resource to represent an API that can contain a collection of Resource entities. Each Resource entity can in turn have one or more Method resources. Expressed in the request parameters and body, a Method defines the application programming interface for the client to access the exposed Resource and represents an incoming request submitted by the client. You then create an Integration resource to integrate the Method with a backend endpoint, also known as the integration endpoint, by forwarding the incoming request to a specified integration endpoint URI. If necessary, you transform request parameters or body to meet the backend requirements. For responses, you can create a MethodResponse resource to represent a request response received by the client and you create an IntegrationResponse resource to represent the request response that is returned by the backend. You can configure the integration response to transform the backend response data before returning the data to the client or to pass the backend response as-is to the client.

To help your customers understand your API, you can also provide documentation for the API, as part of the API creation or after the API is created. To enable this, add a DocumentationPart resource for a supported API entity.

To control how clients call an API, use IAM permissions, a Lambda authorizer, or an Amazon Cognito user pool. To meter the use of your API, set up usage plans to throttle API requests. You can enable these when creating or updating the API.

You can perform these and other tasks by using the API Gateway console, the API Gateway REST API, the Amazon CLI, or one of the Amazon SDKs. We discuss how to perform these tasks next.