Amazon API Gateway vs Lura

Amazon API Gateway is a cloud service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs that connect applications to backend services. It supports REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, including real-time two-way communication. Integrations include AWS Lambda, Step Functions, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, and public HTTP endpoints; HTTP APIs can also route requests to certain private services. API Gateway Portals provide managed spaces to discover, document, and govern REST APIs. Traffic controls include request throttling and configurable caching for REST APIs. The console integrates with Amazon CloudWatch for call, latency, and error metrics, alarms, and execution logs. Authorization options include IAM, Lambda authorizers, OIDC, OAuth 2.0, and other listed methods; REST API keys are optional. A free tier is available to new AWS customers for up to 12 months within monthly allowances, with excess usage charged at standard rates. Pay-as-you-go has no minimum fees or upfront commitments; the listed pricing note is From $1. WebSocket messages can be up to 128 KB and are metered in 32 KB increments.

Lura is a free, open-source Go library for building stateless API gateways and proxies in cloud-native or on-premises deployments. It combines multiple backend sources behind endpoints, allowing a client to request data through one endpoint and receive only the needed fields. Its proxy can group, wrap, transform, and reduce responses, with an EntityFormatter for response manipulation. The framework is organized around configuration, router, and proxy packages, with helpers for encoding, logging, and service discovery. Documented middleware covers balancing, concurrent requests, request and response logging, response merging, and HTTP URL patterns. Lura supports HTTP(S), while adapters for Thrift, gRPC, AMQP, and NATS can be added. The router layer can use other routers, frameworks, or middleware, and generic libraries support plugins such as OAuth layers. It is compiled from source and requires Go. Pricing is free.