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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Note that this indictment includes API Gateway. API Gateway is clunky, buggy, and underdocumented. It's useless if you're not using JSON. It doesn't implement HTTP properly (e.g., a body is returned with 30x and 204 responses). The web interface is buggy to the point of being unusable.

To top it off there's no way to report non-UI bugs unless you are paying $$$.

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In my experience, API Gateway is holding Lambda back. It would help if AWS came out with a radically simpler (and faster) configuration of API Gateway tightly coupled with Lambda, that doesn't require an arcane API to configure routes or get data out of your request and into your response.

API Gateway seems to have been pressed into the role of proxying Lambda without necessarily being fit for purpose. If I understand correctly, API Gateway is a third-party acquisition (which is why its API behaves quite different from most AWS APIs) originally intended to translate and proxy between JSON and XML APIs.

I think API gateway is the primary problem here. I've found writing Lambdas to be relatively fine, but turning those Lambda responses into useful HTTP responses is nothing short of a nightmare.

You are correct (Datawire.io employee here) and I work with the author of the article. Most of our shared frustration stemmed from the API gateway. Lambda as asynchronous event handlers for SQS etc are great. I used it at point to automate DNS assignment for autoscaled servers not behind an ELB.

Yup. Its a shame they can't expose a normal http interface directly to lambda. That would make setting up APIs a thousand times easier. For example I want to have a lambda function receive events from github, but in order to authenticate those requests I need to have the raw body and headers.

The API Gateway has the concept of "custom authorizers" in which another lambda function gets called to authorize the request before it gets passed to the real lambda function (WHY!!!).

The API Gateway feels more like "enterprise" software than anything else I've used in AWS (not in a good way).

I hope the AWS team and jeffbarr are listening.

Custom authorizers are glorious in the corporate context if you don't wanna use role assumption

>To top it off there's no way to report non-UI bugs unless you are paying $$$.

That's not necessarily true. The AWS forums are pretty active, and I was actually able to get some help/feedback from engineers themselves including promises to look at improvements. This is also a good example of how limiting API Gateway is - https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=228067

It's such a shame because it has the potential to be amazing but is so difficult to use and unsatisfying to use.

I wish that it started with the verbs rather than the resources. Set up basic behavior for GET, POST, PUT, &c. and apply it to all resources.

I agree. I've been doing quite a bit of stuff with Lambda and API Gateway lately, and API Gateway is the source of most of my pain.

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