Resilience in Amazon API Gateway

The AWS global infrastructure is built around AWS Regions and Availability Zones. AWS Regions provide multiple physically separated and isolated Availability Zones, which are connected with low-latency, high-throughput, and highly redundant networking. With Availability Zones, you can design and operate applications and databases that automatically fail over between zones without interruption. Availability Zones are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than traditional single or multiple data center infrastructures.

As a fully managed Regional service, API Gateway operates in multiple Availability Zones in each Region, using the redundancy of Availability Zones to minimize infrastructure failure as a category of availability risk. API Gateway is designed to automatically recover from the failure of an Availability Zone.

For more information about AWS Regions and Availability Zones, see AWS Global Infrastructure.

To prevent your APIs from being overwhelmed by too many requests, API Gateway throttles requests to your APIs. Specifically, API Gateway sets a limit on a steady-state rate and a burst of request submissions against all APIs in your account. You can configure custom throttling for your APIs. To learn more, see Throttle requests to your REST APIs for better throughput in API Gateway.

You can use Route 53 health checks to control DNS failover from an API Gateway API in a primary region to an API Gateway API in a secondary region. For an example, see Configure custom health checks for DNS failover for an API Gateway API.