When it comes to improving your digital experience, adopting an API-first approach can have an immediate, measurable impact on your business. Amazon API Gateway is a small but mighty Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution that allows you to instantly transform the customer journey, resulting in richer experiences, higher conversion, and increased revenue.
Yet the benefits of adopting this approach extend well beyond top-level KPIs. This blog will explore how API-first architecture and Amazon API Gateway can position you for growth, competitive advantage, and continued innovation.
Better Customer Journeys Start with API Management
Even when you’ve invested heavily in building your online experience, poor API architecture can undermine your effort and expose you to security risks. That is why handling your APIs is one of the first items we evaluate. Without an API gateway, things can quickly get frustrating for your customers - and costly for your business. Here’s how:
Complex Management: When API resources are connected directly with user-facing applications, it is hard to handle responses and perform critical updates. This complexity could result from different technologies for different APIs or needing to track many API entry points. Sprawling API ecosystems quickly overburden development and operations teams and take critical time away from innovation and new features.
Poor Performance: A direct client-to-microservices pattern may result in longer response times that impact customer engagement and conversion. Additionally, this approach can lead to performance impacts from API consumer load impacting other users in ways that are challenging to detect and resolve. Disparate API backends can also make it tough to monitor and even understand if you are having a performance issue, much less track down the root cause.
Exposure to Risk: Without a gateway barrier between your frontend applications and backend resources, sensitive API endpoints can be exposed and vulnerable to attacks.
Growth and Innovation with API-first Architecture
As you accelerate development to meet customer demand, adopting an API-first architecture boosts your efficiency. It speeds up innovation by allowing you to quickly iterate, test, and release new versions. This agility gives you an edge over competitors and offers new opportunities for market growth.
In addition, APIs extend application functionality by facilitating easier integration and connection to additional tools and systems, which allows you to create richer customer experiences as your product evolves.
As a development team, we utilize Amazon API Gateway to achieve the immediate benefits of this API-first approach.
How Amazon API Gateway Transforms the Digital Experience
Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that allows you to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Acting as a single, unified point of entry across internal APIs, the service allows you to accept and process up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls without increasing latency or reducing performance. API Gateway supports both containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications.
Increased Efficiency: A fully managed service, API Gateway can be rapidly deployed with all the tools needed to create, publish, manage, and secure APIs at scale.
Better Performance & Scalability: API Gateway reduces response times and latency by accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls.
Optimized Costs: Like many AWS microservices, API Gateway provides pay-as-you-go, tiered pricing, so you only pay for the API calls you use and reduce costs as API usage scales.
Improved Security: Control user access and protect your API from specific threats, like malicious users or spikes in traffic. Monitor performance metrics and error rates from the API Gateway dashboard.
In summary, embracing an API-first approach with Amazon API Gateway helps you deliver better customer experiences, increase performance, and drive revenue - while providing the tools you need to accelerate innovation.
Our recent API Gateway AWS Service Delivery Partner designation validates our technical knowledge, experience, and proven success in delivering API-first solutions to clients. To learn how we used this technology to deliver real-world solutions, check out the case studies below:
Ready to improve your digital experience? Let’s connect.