APIs have become the norm for allowing applications to communicate with each other. On AWS, customers turn to Amazon API Gateway to build HTTP, REST, or WebSocket APIs, providing communication endpoints between services and clients. However, API Gateway can do much more. In this session, we demo setting up a REST API using API Gateway. We walk though configuring a simple Lambda-based backend and adding on capabilities around data modeling and validation, custom responses, and functionless integration with backend services. Learn about some of the advanced functionality that can be done at the API level before it ever hits your backend service.