Per your OP, how do you plan on caching requests without it hitting Cloudfront in some way? :P But, I -did- mention there were caveats. Your correct in tha I s

Per your OP, how do you plan on caching requests without it hitting Cloudfront in some way? :P But, I -did- mention there were caveats. Your correct in tha I should probably not have led with "You probably shouldn't", and -then- gotten more nuanced, though. While I agree that optimizing it to not leave the AWS network would be of benefit, if you reach the point you're calling it via the API Gateway internally, it's a separate service, and if it has -any- high availability requirements, or ever will, you should not be reliant on it not leaving the network (since even without going multi-region with distributed DNS, it may be handled by another AZ, introducing latency).