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I'm so glad you asked this! I just built a service on API Gateway + Lambda in the past two weeks. Here's my unstructured thoughts - * I love that I don't have

by teej 11y ago

I'm so glad you asked this! I just built a service on API Gateway + Lambda in the past two weeks. Here's my unstructured thoughts - * I love that I don't have to provision any resources. The fact it will scale to volume automatically is a huge win. * Lambda was a treat to work with. We used it with Python. Both the web console and API interface worked great for us. * I was able to get Lambda development working end-to-end with a Makefile and the AWS CLI. * API Gateway was a bear to work with. The concepts are unintuitive, the interface sucks, and the logging is lackluster. I found it difficult to go through the develop/test/deploy cycle on because of these issues. * API Gateway is brand new. Brand new AWS services have bugs. We hit bugs. * API Gateway documentation is awful. * API Gateway had a bug where it stopped logging. If it doesn't log, it is literally impossible to debug. This hard-stopped development for 5 days while they worked on a fix. * There's an invisible error case where your API doesn't have permissions to invoke the Lambda command. It's easy to hit and annoying. * API Gateway doesn't support POST requests in the way you would expect. This leads to over-complicated setups for simple use cases. * I really don't prefer the way mapping templates work in API Gateway. Overall, our setup is humming along nicely, but it's just 2 routes. I just reviewed the Gist and I agree with many of the concerns expressed in it.

jeffbarr 11y ago
Have you reported any of your issues with the API Gateway to us? Please feel free to send them to me via the contact address in my HN profile and I will share them with the team ASAP!
- teej 11y ago
  I went through official support channels with my blocking issues. They have since been resolved.
crabasa 11y ago
This is such a great comment (polite, constructive, unbiased). It made me think that I wish there was a site like Ars Technica, but for PaaS/IaaS.
eistrati 11y ago
We have encountered consistently HTTP 500 response when creating multiple methods simultaneously. I think they have fixed it by now, but imagine the color of my face when I'm about to present a demo to a pretty large audience and we discover this bug?
robterrell 11y ago
I could have just written this comment -- I spent the past two weeks doing the same thing, but in JS, and hit all of the same problems. In the end, I think API Gateway is more trouble than it's worth. I wish Lambda could have an exposed HTTP endpoint. Mapping all of the arguments in and out is so incredibly tedious when developing and things are changing fast.

by teej 11y ago

jeffbarr 11y ago

Have you reported any of your issues with the API Gateway to us? Please feel free to send them to me via the contact address in my HN profile and I will share them with the team ASAP!

teej 11y ago
I went through official support channels with my blocking issues. They have since been resolved.

crabasa 11y ago

This is such a great comment (polite, constructive, unbiased). It made me think that I wish there was a site like Ars Technica, but for PaaS/IaaS.

eistrati 11y ago

We have encountered consistently HTTP 500 response when creating multiple methods simultaneously. I think they have fixed it by now, but imagine the color of my face when I'm about to present a demo to a pretty large audience and we discover this bug?

robterrell 11y ago

I could have just written this comment -- I spent the past two weeks doing the same thing, but in JS, and hit all of the same problems. In the end, I think API Gateway is more trouble than it's worth. I wish Lambda could have an exposed HTTP endpoint. Mapping all of the arguments in and out is so incredibly tedious when developing and things are changing fast.