Episode #40: HTTP APIs for API Gateway with Eric Johnson and Alan Tan

About Eric Johnson

Eric Johnson is a Senior Developer Advocate for serverless at AWS. His passion is to help developers understand and employ best practices for planning and developing event driven, highly scalable applications using serverless technologies. Eric has been a software developer and architect for almost 25 years with a focus on serverless since 2014.

About Alan Tan

Alan is a Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services working on the API Gateway product team. He was previously a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft and software developer before that. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Microbiology & Immunology from The University of British Columbia..

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with Eric Johnson and Alan Tan. Hi Eric and Alan, thanks for joining me.

Eric: Hey, thanks for having us.

Alan: Hey, Jeremy, thanks for having us.

Jeremy: So, Eric, let's start with you. You are a senior developer advocate for serverless at AWS, so why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your background, and what it is you do at AWS?

Eric: Yeah, absolutely, my background is I've been a developer since 1995. Yes, that's right. I am an old guy. I've been doing serverless since serverless came out, the day they announced serverless I looked at it and said, "Wow, why would you do anything different?"

I've been following that trail for a long time. I now work for AWS. I've been there for almost two years. I am a senior developer advocate for serverless at AWS. I love all things automated, all things serverless, so I'm having a great time.

As far as our role, what we do, is we're kind of a two-way conversation with developers, and users of serverless, we like to teach on how to serverless and get the message out and the best way to use serverless, how to make it useful for all workloads, but we also listen.

We try to bring back what the developers are saying to the product team, to someone like an Alan Tan, so they know, hey here's what people are saying, here's what they're wanting, here are the paper cuts, here's what they're loving, that kind of thing. I love my role and appreciate you having me here today.

Jeremy: Awesome, all right, so Alan, you are a senior product manager, so why don't you tell the listeners about your background and then what you do as a senior product manager?

Alan: Yes, I started in computer science, a developer just like Eric for a long time, and then I went into product management building products for big data analytics, data analysis, and most recently, been doing this for two years now in the API Gateway team, product manager for API Gateway.

So, what I do, I'm a senior product manager, so I talk to customers directly. I talk to people like Eric. I talk to people like Jeremy, yourself as well, to get the feedback of what customers are really looking for, and then translating that back into the product. So, our customers think we're building the right thing, and they really love coming back to us and using the same product over and over again.

Jeremy: Awesome, all right, well, so you work on the API Gateway team, and just the other day, AWS released HTTP APIs, which is really, really cool. So, can you explain to listeners what that is?

Alan: Yeah, of course, so just to start with some context of where that came from, so when I talked to customers, they usually come back to us for improvements and feature requests, but there are a few things that are really core to products, so more generally, when people think of products and the things they use, whether that's an appliance, a car, a computer, there are certain things they look for.

Which is how can we get this thing faster? How can we get it cheaper and better? API Gateway is no exception to that. Our customers come back asking us the same things, so last year we started looking into how we can continuously deliver on these improvements for them. The results was HTTP APIs.

So, it offers the core functionality of REST API at a 71% lower price, that's at a dollar per million in IAD, a dollar per million requests, sub ten millisecond latency overhead at the P99 level, that's a 60% improvement, and way easier to use features. So, you can think of HTTP APIs as the next generation platform for API Gateway's API types a kind of V2.

Jeremy: Awesome, now Eric, you have done a ton of stuff with API Gateway, with the REST APIs. You had your happy little APIs show on Twitch, kind of getting into all the details. I know you love service integrations and all that kind of stuff that you've been working on.

Eric: Yes, sir.

Jeremy: But you're pretty excited about HTTP APIs as well.

Eric: I am, yeah. For me, as a developer, HTTP API brings a lot. I'm going to start with the better part, the cheaper, faster, those are great, and I love those, and those are huge to our clients, but as a developer, the better part for me is the UI, is the interface.

There's been a lot of work done on how do I, as a developer, interact with API Gateway and how do I develop against API Gateway? It just starts with something like the UI. When you get a look at the UI, and if you've seen it, we did announce it last year at re:Invent.

I've gotten in. You've seen it. Hopefully, you've seen wow, this is a lot simpler. One of the examples that I'll use is CORS. And if you've ever heard me talk about API Gateway, I like to have everybody raise their hand and say, "Who loves CORS?" There's good a surprise, nobody raises their hand except for one person, and he's a liar, so you know that's...

Jeremy: That's probably me....

Eric: Yeah, probably you.

Jeremy: No, I hate CORS as well.

Eric: Nobody loves CORS, and CORS is not easy, but it is a necessary thing, so what a lot of folks end up doing is they just put stars in their CORS. Hey let anybody get to it. Let anything happen. Let anything get to it, because configuring CORS is too complex.

Well with HTTP API, we've taken that, we've simplified that. I say we, but really Alan's team has done a lot of great work on this, but I take credit for it when Alan's not around. So, what we've done is we've made the CORS integration a lot easier to set up, so you can add, here's the domains that should be allowed to get to it.

Here's the methods, and it's all in a simple UI. We've also taken and extended that where we're able to simplify the return coming out of your Lambda or your backend, and we use heuristics, which is a big word that I've just learned recently, but we use some logic to fill in the CORS data and return to the customer.

So, a lot of the heavy lifting of configuring CORS and other items have been simplified, so as ...