AWS launches Usage Plans for API Gateway service

At its AWS Summit in New York, public cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that it is adding new controls to its API Gateway service that companies can use to expose application programming interfaces (APIs) for online services that other developers can integrate into their own applications.

“Because the APIs often provide substantial business value, our customers have told us that they would like to build APIs, regulate access to them, and monetize them by charging based on usage,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.

The new Usage Plans option in API Gateway provides more sophisticated ways to adjust how developers access those APIs. It includes options for setting rate limits — for instance, each API key can only make requests from an API a certain number of times per second — and imposing quotas — such as the number of requests that can be made in a given month — for certain groups of users, like free tier, premium tier, and enterprise tier. You can add new API keys for existing usage plans and download usage data for usage plans in CSV or JSON format.

The API Gateway isn’t the most popular service available on AWS. But these additions will make the service more palatable and will make it compete more successfully with dedicated API management services from companies like Red Hat-owned 3scale and MuleSoft. Throttling controls are already available from the Azure API Management service from Microsoft Azure, which is second only to AWS in the public cloud business.

Usage Plans are now available for anyone to use, Barr wrote.

Also today AWS announced price cuts for Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots, the availability of the previously announced Amazon Kinesis Analytics service, and IPv6 support for the S3 storage service.