hands-on lab

Secure API Gateway Endpoints with Custom Authorizers

Difficulty: Intermediate

Duration: Up to 1 hour and 30 minutes

Students: 7,709

Rating: 4.4/5

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Description

Lab Overview

Amazon API Gateway offers several native authorization mechanisms, such as managed API keys, IAM Roles, and custom authorizers. API Keys (with the help of Usage Plans) can help manage custom throttling and quotas for your API consumers. IAM is a good choice when your consumers require access to AWS resources and you need to manage permissions on a per-user basis. However, custom authorizers give you much more flexibility. With custom authorizers, you can implement any 3rd-party integration and generate very granular authorization policies.

In this Lab, we will learn how to implement a custom authorizer in AWS Lambda to secure your API Gateway Resources.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this Lab you will be able to:

Understand API Gateway request authorization
Explain the advantages of using custom authorizers in API Gateway
Create Lambda functions to implement custom authorizers using AWS Lambda blueprints
Test custom authorizers using methods appropriate at each stage of deployment

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

AWS Lambda basics
API Gateway basics

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

Updates

May 8th, 2024 - Resolved deployment issue

January 25th, 2024 - Updated to latest Node.js version

October 25th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

December 1st, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

May 12th, 2022 - Updated lab to utilize a Cloud Academy-hosted Linux command-line interface

November 17th, 2021 - Fixed the link to the lambda function complete code listing

January 22nd, 2021 - Updated AWS Lambda lab steps to reflect the latest user interface updates

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab

Nov. 15th, 2018 - Lab completely updated including easier-to-follow instructions, screenshots to match the latest experience, and removal of security warnings in the AWS Console.