Introduction

AWS offers a range of different Serverless services, among them, are AWS AppSync and Amazon API Gateway— the two most important services for building APIs. In this article, we will take a look at the difference between these two AWS services.

What is AWS AppSync?

AWS AppSync is a fully managed service that makes it easy to develop GraphQL APIs by handling the heavy lifting of securely connecting to data sources like AWS DynamoDB, Lambda, and more. Adding caches to improve performance, subscriptions to support real-time updates, and client-side data stores that keep off-line clients in sync are just as easy.

Source

GraphQL APIs built with AWS AppSync give front-end developers the ability to query multiple databases, microservices, and APIs from a single GraphQL endpoint.

What is Amazon API Gateway?

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications.

API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization, and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management.

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Comparison Between AWS AppSync And Amazon API Gateway

Conclusion

API Gateway and AppSync both are great services for building APIs. AppSync is easier to use in some scenarios compared to API Gateway’s complexity if you want to go with GraphQL implementation. API Gateway also has multiple REST and WebSocket options and many features supported for APIs.

Sources

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/
  2. https://aws.amazon.com/api-gateway/
  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appsync/latest/devguide/security-authz.html
  4. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/http-api-access-control.html
  5. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/apigateway-control-access-to-api.html
  6. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/apigateway-websocket-api-control-access.html

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