AWS Is Selling The API Solution The Enterprise Will Buy, Not Necessarily The API Solution They Need

I shared my view on the AWS API Gateway yesterday. I'm all about the AWS kool-aid (oh yeah!), but overall I was left underwhelmed. I feel the release of the API solutions represents a pretty significant milestone along the API highway, but overall I think we should be further on down the road.

There is much to celebrate about what AWS is up to. It acknowledges the need to deploy APIs from the common resources we have move into the cloud, and provides us some pretty forward thinking ways of crafting resource-based API that uses Hypertext Application Language (HAL). #WINNING

I'm sure AWS chose their wording very carefully when they named the project, but where the AWS API solution falls short for me, is with the concept of a gateway (that this moves us forward). I'm all behind what AWS is delivering for consumers, I just do not get behind paving over the lessons learned when migrating these legacy resources (holy shit--we have legacy resources in the cloud), and evolving them (along with our on-premise ones) towards a more sensible resource-based API-centric approach.

I just would like to see less gateway, and more HTTP, Hypermedia (Siren, Collections+JSON, JSON-LD), and API literacy along the way, something that could be incorporated into the road-map (wink, wink). While there are forwarding thinking aspects of the AWS API Gateway, I feel like it is more crafted to deliver what the enterprise will buy, and not necessarily what they need to put them on the meaningful API journey they need to be on--this feels more like a vendor journey to me.

As my friend Steve Klabnik says, it can be tough when your idols fail you--when we hold them up so high. Anyways, we are just getting started with AWS API Gateway, maybe there still is hope! ;-)