APIs are the hot topic everyone talks about. Today, even CEO's appear to know what an API is. SOA is dead. Long live the API. This talk will give an overview of designing and implementing REST APIs in the context of AWS. We will cover the basics, but get pretty technical for most of the presentation. Followed by a deep dive of building a Survey API using API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB (Surprised? ;-). Two architectural styles will be showcased. 1. Server-less design - API Gateway and Lambda 2. Server-based design - Elastic Beanstalk Live demo will be given using API Gateway and Lambda to design a basic API from scratch in only 15 minutes.

1. #6 - Survey Results and Building APIs on AWS
10 November 2015
Presenter: Sebastian Krueger – Co-Founder and Technical Director at API Talent

2. Acknowledgements
We would like to thanks our sponsors for their help in making
AWS User Group Wellington a success.
Bronnie – OptimalPeople
Dan - OptimalBI
Buzzy – Amazon Web Services
Seb – API Talent

3. Agenda
• Part I: Survey Results
• Part II: Building APIs on AWS
• API Overview
• API Case Study
• Server-based APIs on AWS Overview
• Server-less APIs on AWS Overview / Demo

4. Part I

5. Survey: Meetup Quality Rating
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
1 2 3 4 5 N/A
User Group Rating
User Group Rating
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
1 2 3 4 5 0
Num Meetups Attended
Num Meetups Attended

6. Survey: Meetup Scheduling
0
5
10
15
20
25
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
Meetup Day
Meetup Day
0
5
10
15
20
25
12pm 1pm 4pm 530pm 6pm
Meetup Time
Meetup Time
0
5
10
15
20
25
Every 4
weeks
Every 5
weeks
Every 6
weeks
Every 7
weeks
Every 8
weeks
Meetup Frequency
Meetup Frequency

7. Survey: Meetup Content
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Technical Deep Dive AWS Service Overview Generic Use Cases Wellington AWS
Customer Solutions
Meetup Content
Meetup Content

8. Survey: Meetup Content
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Technical Deep Dive AWS Service Overview Generic Use Cases Wellington AWS
Customer Solutions
Meetup Content
Meetup Content
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Technical Deep Dive AWS Service Overview Generic Use Cases Wellington AWS
Customer Solutions
Meetup Content – Most Preferred
Meetup Content - The Most

9. Survey: Meetup Content – Service Category
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
Service Category First Choice
Service Category First Choice

10. Survey: Meetup Content – Service Category
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
Service Category First Choice
Service Category First Choice
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Service Category Second Choice
Service Category Second Choice

11. Survey: Meetup Speaker Type
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
AWS Staff Enterprise AWS
Customers
Startup AWS
Customers
AWS Technology
Partners
AWS Consulting
Partners
Speaker Type
Speaker Type

12. Survey: Meetup Speaker Type
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
AWS Staff Enterprise AWS
Customers
Startup AWS
Customers
AWS Technology
Partners
AWS Consulting
Partners
Speaker Type
Speaker Type
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
AWS Staff Enterprise AWS
Customers
Startup AWS
Customers
AWS Technology
Partners
AWS Consulting
Partners
Speaker Type – Most Preferred
Speaker Type - The Most

13. Survey: Respondents - Who are you?
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
Cloud
Architect
DevOps
Engineer / IT
Ops
Application
Developer
Manager
(Practice /
Project)
Other
Job Function
Job Function
0
5
10
15
20
Every day, all day
long
Weekly Monthly Not at all
AWS Usage Frequency
AWS Usage Frequency
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
No skills Novice /
Beginner
Intermediate Advanced Expert World Class
Cloud Ninja
AWS Skill Level
AWS Skill Level

14. Survey: Respondents – AWS Certs
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Solutions Architect
- Associate
Developer -
Associate
SysOps
Administrator -
Associate
Solutions Architect
- Professional
DevOps Engineer -
Professional
AWS Certs Completed
AWS Certs Completed
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
Not interested Considering it Started Studying
More Certs?
More Certs?

15. Survey: Cloud Vendors
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
Amazon Web
Services
Microsoft Azure Google Compute OpenStack Other Total Survey
Responses
Using Which Cloud Vendors
Using Which Cloud Vendors

16. Survey Results Summary
• Meetup day of the week: Tuesday
• Meetup time: 4pm or 5.30pm
• Meetup frequency: 6 weeks
• Meetup Content:
• Anything goes.
• Technical deep dive preferred
• Service Categories: 1st Compute, 2nd Storage, 3rd Analytics
• Speaker type:
• Anything goes
• Enterprise Customers or Startup Customers preferred

17. Part II

18. What is an API?
An Application Programming Interface (API) is a
specification intended to be used as an interface by
software components to communicate with each
other. An API may include specifications for routines,
data structures, object classes, and variables.
Source: Wikipedia

19. An analogy: The evolution of the car industry
follows the logic of APIs
Yesterday
Carmaker = craftsman
• Tailor made
• Custom design for each element of the car (wheels, seats,
brakes, lights, roof, etc.)
• Restricted modularity
• No standardised processes
Source: 3Scale, What is an API?
Today
Carmaker = system integrator
• Car divided into subsystems (powertrain, brakes, steering,
suspension, etc.)
• Main elements designed separately and reused in
different cars
• Standardised processes
• Communication interfaces between different engineering
teams

20. An analogy: The evolution of the car industry
follows the logic of APIs

21. So, what is an API?

22. API Case Study: Fitbit API, externalising R&D
Fitbit is a fitness tracker that records health and
fitness data.
Originally, there was only one application using
the data developed by Fitbit.
In 2011, Fitbit created an API to allow third party
developers to create fitness apps using Fitbit
health data such as daily steps, calories burned,
food eaten and weight.

23. Thriving innovation based on the Fitbit API
34 Apps were built on the Fitbit API creating innovative uses of fitness
and health data.

24. What would it have cost if there were no APIs?
What would it have cost if Fitbit had developed these apps themselves?
Let’s assume 1 application = $50,000
34 applications are using the fitness data from Fitbit API
Developing these apps would have cost FitBit:
$1,700,000

25. Even your bottle has an API!

26. Endless possibilities…

27. But…What do these APIs actually look like?
APIs can be classified in several categories depending what abstraction
is being described.
API Category Example Timeline
Operating System API for MS Windows
API for Apple Mac OS X (Cocoa)
1985-
2001-
Programming Languages Java API 1995-
Application Services API for SAP (BAPI) 1990s-
Infrastructure Services Amazon Web Services API 2002-
Web Services Twitter API 2006-

28. REST architecture for APIs
RESTFul is a style of software architecture that allows data exchange
through human readable URIs.
REST language uses nouns and verbs, and has an emphasis on
readability. It ultimately uses less bandwidth than other languages
such as SOAP for instance.
• GET – Access a resource
• PUT – Update a resource
• POST – Create a resource
• DELETE – Delete a resource

29. Let’s Build an API using AWS
There are a few options:
• Roll your own (raw EC2) (could use CodeDeploy)
• OpsWorks
• Elastic Beanstalk
• API Gateway / Lambda
Use 3rd Party PaaS (on top of AWS):
• Heroku, Cloud 66, etc, etc, etc

30. First Up: AWS Beanstalk
• EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud
• S3 – Simple Storage Service
• ELB – Elastic Load Balancer
• Auto Scaling – starts new EC2 instances
• EBS – Elastic Block Storage; virtual hard disks
AWS Beanstalk provides a convenience layer on top of all of these
services.

31. Elastic Beanstalk in a Nutshell
• EC2 Server
• + Linux
• + OpenJDK
• + Tomcat
• Scaling Elastic Load Balancer /
Auto Scaling
• Deploy artefacts on S3
• Can add database (RDS)

32. AWS Beanstalk Language Support

33. Let’s build a Java-based Web API
DEMO TIME
GET http://somewhere/hello/seb
Returns:
“Hello seb”

34. Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda
AMS Lambda + Amazon API Gateway means no infrastructure to
manage - AWS does the scaling for you.
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.
Lambda functions is stateless, trigger based code execution.

35. A new, fully managed model

36. Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda
Demo: Hello World with Name using Lambda/Python
GET http://somewhere/hello/seb
Returns:
“Hello seb”

37. Thanks to our Sponsors