Amazon EventBridge: API Destinations Demystified-Part I

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Amazon EventBridge is becoming one of the widely used serverless services of AWS. Along with the expanding set of features, its industry adoption is also growing fast.

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easier to connect applications with data from a variety of sources.

One of the great benefits of developing on AWS is the possibility of using native service integrations that eliminate the need for lambda functions acting as mediators and data-shifters. Terms such as code-less and functionless often refer to these integration patterns.

API Destinations is one such cool feature that promotes native service integration to reach external API targets.

This is a two-part article on API destinations. In this first part, we will look at the features of API destinations, its benefits, integration options, and a use case on how it helps to communicate between microservices.

In a subsequent article, we will see how to store API credentials in Secrets Manager and make it work with EventBridge cost-efficiently.

What Are API Destinations?

API destinations are HTTP endpoints that can be configured as targets for event routing rules. They help integrate with applications using RESTful API calls.

API destinations. Source AWS Docs

A Connection is the core of an API destination. It defines the authorization method and the credentials to connect to an endpoint.

As shown above, a connection supports the following authorization methods.

• Basic auth
• API Key auth
• OAuth

Event Routing Rule With API Destinations

The following diagram captures the main elements of a rule with API destinations as the target.