Lambdas and aws: The clear difference between API and HTTP API
Summary: Use HttpApi.
Taxonomy
Probably the most painful aspect of this is that at some point AWS completely gave up on taxonomically separating these two services and basically throughout the documentation they’re referred to using many different conflicting and confusing names. To make sense of this you need to completely ignore the normal (sane) use of the words “http”, “api” or “rest” as they’re purely arbitrary classifiers for amazon. That said, here is the best taxonomic separation I can arrive at:
Type 1: Api
Type 2: HttpApi
Official documentation
AWS’ own comparison (warning: basically useless).
Authorization methods comparison (e.g. HttpApi does not support IAM but does support OAuth 2.0 where Api does not).
See here for clues on the categorization of “Api” and “HttpApi” using the help docs for
CloudformationSAM templates.
Side by side
| Api | HttpApi |
|---|---|
| AKA: Api, REST API, AWS::ApiGateway::RestApi, ServerlessRestApi (Logical Id), | AKA: RESTful Api, HTTP API, AWS::Serverless::HttpApi, ServerlessHttpApi (Logical Id), AWS::ApiGatewayV2::Api |
| Lambda return value: Must return a specific format (source) | Will infer correct formatting so can return a string or a Dict, etc (source) |
| More features, more complicated, harder | Fewer features, easier, lower cost |
| Lambda specific docs | Lambda specific docs |
| Template resource properties source | Template resource properties (source) |
| Managed with ApiGateway (v1) source | Managed with ApiGatewayV2 (which can also create a websocket api) source |