AWS Service Catalog vs Amazon API Gateway: What are the differences?

Introduction

This article will provide the key differences between AWS Service Catalog and Amazon API Gateway. Both of these services are provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are designed to help developers and IT teams build and manage their applications.

1. Integration and Functionality: AWS Service Catalog is primarily focused on managing and distributing infrastructure and application resources, allowing users to create and manage catalogs of approved products and services. On the other hand, Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that helps developers create, publish, and manage APIs for their applications. It provides features like authentication, authorization, and request/response transformations to enhance the functionality of the APIs.

2. Use Case: AWS Service Catalog is particularly useful in organizations that want to manage and control the availability of resources and applications for their users. It provides a centralized location to store and distribute approved products and services, ensuring that users can easily find and deploy the resources they need. Amazon API Gateway, on the other hand, caters to developers who want to expose APIs for their applications, making it easier for other developers or third-party applications to access and consume the functionality provided by these APIs.

3. Resource Management: AWS Service Catalog helps in managing and tracking the usage and costs associated with the resources and applications available in the catalog. It provides features like tagging, access controls, and versioning to ensure proper management and governance of the resources. In contrast, Amazon API Gateway focuses on managing APIs and provides features such as throttling, caching, and logging to handle the usage and performance aspects of the exposed APIs.

4. Security and Authentication: With AWS Service Catalog, administrators can apply security policies and access controls to the resources and products available in the catalog. They can define who can access and deploy specific resources, ensuring proper governance and control. Amazon API Gateway offers authentication and authorization mechanisms like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Cognito, enabling developers to secure access to their APIs and control who can invoke them.

5. Deployment and Scaling: AWS Service Catalog allows users to deploy and manage resources and applications using AWS CloudFormation. It leverages CloudFormation templates to define the infrastructure and application stacks, enabling users to easily deploy and update their resources. Amazon API Gateway takes care of the scalability aspects, automatically scaling to handle the incoming API traffic and ensuring high availability with built-in global CDN caching.

6. Monitoring and Analytics: AWS Service Catalog provides metrics and logs for the resources and applications deployed through the catalog. It integrates with other AWS monitoring and analytics services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail to provide insights into resource usage and activities. Amazon API Gateway offers monitoring and analytics features specific to APIs, allowing developers to track the API usage, latency, and errors using API Gateway's built-in CloudWatch metrics and logs.

In Summary, AWS Service Catalog focuses on managing and distributing infrastructure and application resources, while Amazon API Gateway helps developers create, publish, and manage APIs for their applications, with specific features related to API management, security, scalability, and monitoring.