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Amazon API Gateway VS AWS Step Functions

Compare Amazon API Gateway VS AWS Step Functions and see what are their differences

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Amazon API Gateway logo Amazon API Gateway

Create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale

AWS Step Functions logo AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
  • Amazon API Gateway Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-12
  • AWS Step Functions Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-29

Amazon API Gateway features and specs

  • Scalability
    API Gateway automatically scales to handle the number of requests your API receives, ensuring high availability and reliability.
  • Ease of Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like Lambda, DynamoDB, and IAM, enabling a cohesive environment for developing serverless applications.
  • Built-in Security
    Provides features such as IAM roles, API keys, and AWS WAF integration for safeguarding your APIs from potential threats.
  • Monitoring and Logging
    Supports CloudWatch integration for monitoring API requests and responses, helping you maintain observability and troubleshoot issues effectively.
  • Cost-Effective
    You only pay for the requests made to your APIs and the amount of data transferred out, making it a cost-effective solution for many use cases.
  • Caching
    Built-in caching at the API Gateway level can improve performance and reduce latency for frequently accessed data.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon API Gateway

  • Complexity in Configuration
    Setting up and managing API Gateway can be complex, especially for users who are not familiar with AWS services and cloud infrastructure.
  • Cold Start Latency
    When integrated with AWS Lambda, cold starts can introduce latency which can affect the performance of your API.
  • Cost for High Throughput
    While cost-effective for low to moderate usage, the costs can escalate with high throughput and large data transfers.
  • Debugging Issues
    Diagnosis can be complicated due to the multi-tenant nature of the service and the need to dive into multiple AWS logs and services.
  • Limited Customization
    There might be constraints regarding customizations and fine-tuning your APIs compared to self-hosting solutions.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Dependence on AWS infrastructure can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to other cloud providers or solutions.

AWS Step Functions features and specs

  • Orchestration
    AWS Step Functions provide a way to coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows, making it easier to build and run distributed applications and microservices.
  • Visual Workflow
    The service offers a visual interface to build, run, and monitor multi-step workflows, allowing for easier debugging and comprehension of complex processes.
  • Error Handling
    Step Functions offer built-in error handling, retry logic, and state management, which simplifies the process of managing failures and ensures more robust applications.
  • Scalability
    As a fully managed service, AWS Step Functions handle the scaling of operations automatically, allowing workflows to scale based on demand without manual intervention.
  • Integration
    Deep integration with other AWS services such as Lambda, ECS, SNS, SQS, and DynamoDB, making it straightforward to build complex, integrated workflows.
  • Cost-Effectiveness
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model means you only pay for each state transition, which can be more cost-effective compared to maintaining your own orchestration layer.
  • Audit and Logging
    Automatically logs the state of each execution, which can be used for auditing, debugging, and monitoring purposes.
  • Serverless
    Being a serverless service, it eliminates the need for server management and scaling concerns, ensuring a simpler operational setup.

Possible disadvantages of AWS Step Functions

  • Complexity
    For simple tasks, the overhead of creating and managing workflows with Step Functions can be excessive compared to using straightforward AWS Lambda functions or other simple services.
  • Cold Start Latency
    Like other serverless services, AWS Step Functions can suffer from cold start latency, especially in low-usage scenarios.
  • Cost
    While the pay-as-you-go model can be cost-effective, for workflows with a high number of state transitions, costs can accumulate quickly, making it potentially expensive.
  • Service Limits
    AWS Step Functions have certain limits, such as the number of active state machines per account and state transition limits, that could impact very large scale operations.
  • Learning Curve
    There can be a significant learning curve associated with mastering the service, particularly for those unfamiliar with AWS or similar orchestration tools.
  • JSON-Based Definitions
    State machines are defined in JSON, which can become complex and less readable when dealing with large workflows involving multiple states.
  • Limited Regional Availability
    As with many AWS services, Step Functions are not available in all regions, which can limit its use for global applications.

Amazon API Gateway videos

+ Add

Building APIs with Amazon API Gateway

More videos:

  • Review - Create API using AWS API Gateway service - Amazon API Gateway p1

AWS Step Functions videos

+ Add

Orchestrating Distributed Business Workflows with AWS Step Functions - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Parallelism and concurrency in Step Functions and AWS Lambda
  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Workflows for development and testing

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon API Gateway and AWS Step Functions)

Amazon API Gateway

AWS Step Functions

API Tools
100 100%
API Tools
0% 0
Workflow Automation
0 0%
Workflow Automation
100% 100
APIs
100 100%
APIs
0% 0
Automation
0 0%
Automation
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Step Functions. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon API Gateway and AWS Step Functions

Amazon API Gateway Reviews

We have no reviews of Amazon API Gateway yet.
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AWS Step Functions Reviews

Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
This service suits for many use cases, such as building ETL pipelines, orchestrating microservices, and managing high workloads. AWS Step Functions is particularly efficient when combined with other AWS solutions: Lambda for computing, Dynamo DB for storage, Athena for Analytics, SageMaker for machine learning, etc.
Source: blog.skyvia.com
10 Best Airflow Alternatives for 2024
AWS Step Functions enable the incorporation of AWS services such as Lambda, Fargate, SNS, SQS, SageMaker, and EMR into business processes, Data Pipelines, and applications. Users and enterprises can choose between 2 types of workflows: Standard (for long-running workloads) and Express (for high-volume event processing workloads), depending on their use case.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon API Gateway should be more popular than AWS Step Functions. It has been mentiond 107 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon API Gateway mentions (107)

  • 10 Lightweight API Gateways for Your Next Project
    AWS API Gateway is Amazon’s managed gateway service, designed to work seamlessly within the AWS ecosystem. It supports both REST and WebSocket APIs, with HTTP APIs being the lightweight, lower-cost option for simple proxying and routing use cases. - Source: dev.to / 13 days ago
  • 4 Cognito User Pools features you might not know about
    This opens up a world of customization options for controlling app access. For example, we can embed custom data in the ID token for the front-end client to use, enabling guards to restrict content. Alternatively, we can add custom scopes to the access token and implement fine-grained access control in an API Gateway API. All it takes is some Lambda function code, and Cognito triggers it at the right time. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Verifying Cognito access tokens - Comparing three JWT packages for Lambda authorizers
    When the built-in Amazon API Gateway authorization methods don’t fully meet our needs, we can set up Lambda authorizers to manage the access control process. Even when using Cognito user pools and Cognito access tokens, there may still be a need for custom authorization logic. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Implementing advanced authorization with AWS Lambda for endpoint-specific access
    The API Gateway includes an endpoint structured like this:. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Turning APIs into Revenue: Passive Income Strategies for Developers
    Amazon Web Services exemplifies this approach with automatic volume discounts that encourage increased usage while maximizing revenue at each consumption level. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
View more

AWS Step Functions mentions (67)

  • Create Stateful Serverless Workflows with AWS Step Functions and JSONata
    As an avid user of AWS Step Functions, I've been pleased by several excellent releases over the past few years, including Distributed Map, Express Workflows, Intrinsic functions, TestState, redrive, service integrations, and so many others. Those are all fantastic releases, but in my humble opinion, none of them are as big of a deal as the introduction of JSONata expressions. AWS announced this game-changing... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Automate Email Processing using Event Driven Architecture and Generative AI
    Because the code above enables EventBridge events on the bucket, we can then create a new EventBridge rule to trigger a StepFunction that will then process the emails as follows:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What is AWS Step Functions? - A Complete Guide
    AWS Step Functions is one of those game-changing services that has completely changed how I approach this problem. Today, I want to share my experience with Step Functions and how it can simplify your serverless workflows. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Large-scale Data Processing with Step Functions : AWS Project
    The solution uses AWS Step Functions to provides end to end orchestration for processing billions of records with your simulation or transformation logic using AWS Step Functions Distributed Map and Activity features. At the start of the workflow, Step Functions will scale the number of workers to a (configurable) predefined number. It then reads in the dataset and distributes metadata about the dataset in batches... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • How to invoke a lambda function from your database
    If you need to run long-running jobs, consider using AWS Step Functions in tandem with Lambda functions. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon API Gateway and AWS Step Functions, you can also consider the following products

Postman - The Collaboration Platform for API Development

Apache Airflow - Airflow is a platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Kestra.io - Infinitely scalable, event-driven, language-agnostic orchestration and scheduling platform to manage millions of workflows declaratively in code.

Apigee - Intelligent and complete API platform

Dagster - The cloud-native open source orchestrator for the whole development lifecycle, with integrated lineage and observability, a declarative programming model, and best-in-class testability.

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