Amazon API Gateway Service Delivery · API Gateway front door

Tenderd: a Control Tower-governed, region-locked AWS landing zone in the UAE

Sovereign in-country landing zonePolicy-enforced region lockData residencyMulti-account segmentationPreventive controlsCentralized immutable audit loggingCentralized workforce identityIdentity federation & MFA enforcementEncryption-at-rest enforcementPrivate connectivity & network isolationInfrastructure-as-code foundationCI/CD delivery pipeline automationDay-2 runbooks & team enablementCloud-to-cloud migrationPhased cutover with parity validationContainer platform modernizationConnected device telemetry & alertingInfrastructure observabilitySecrets management & credential eliminationMigration TCO & business case modellingTarget-state architecture design & costed POC

Eligible

UAE public-sector contracts unlocked by in-country residency

2 → 5

governance and security maturity, five-point CAF scale

standing console access — every change through reviewed Terraform

Amazon API GatewayAmazon CognitoAmazon ECS (Fargate)AWS WAF

Tenderd’s AI fleet-analytics platform serves construction, energy, logistics, and marine enterprises through its APIs — and in the GCP-to-AWS migration VeUP designed, those APIs get a single governed front door: Amazon API Gateway, with authentication migrated from Auth0 to Amazon Cognito, the application tier on Amazon ECS Fargate and AWS Lambda behind it, and Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, and Route 53 at the edge.

The challenge

A platform migration is the one chance to fix the API layer without breaking customers. On GCP, Tenderd’s application APIs and their Auth0 authentication had grown with the product; the move to AWS — sequenced region-first for Middle East operations — required those endpoints to arrive on the new estate with identity, throttling, and observability designed in, not bolted on. Fleet-telematics traffic raises the stakes: the APIs serve operational data that customers’ field operations depend on, so the front door had to be governed without becoming a bottleneck.

The solution

The migration architecture VeUP authored makes Amazon API Gateway the platform’s API control plane. Authentication moves to Amazon Cognito, with API Gateway enforcing it at the door — token validation, per-route authorization, and throttling handled before any application compute runs. Behind the gateway, the application tier lands on Amazon ECS Fargate and AWS Lambda across four delivery environments (Dev / Test / Pre-Prod / Production), while the data tier spans Amazon RDS, ElastiCache, MongoDB Atlas, and Amazon Redshift, and fleet telemetry streams over Amazon MSK. At the perimeter, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, and Amazon Route 53 complete the path from client to API. The result is an API surface whose security posture, rate limits, and metrics are declared once at the gateway and inherited by every environment — provisioned as code alongside the rest of the landing zone.

Production outcomes

KPI	Result
API modernization	Application APIs re-fronted on Amazon API Gateway with Amazon Cognito identity — authentication, authorization, and throttling consolidated at one governed entry point across all four delivery environments.
Defense-in-depth path	CloudFront + AWS WAF + Route 53 ahead of the gateway, ECS Fargate and Lambda behind it — every request crosses the same filtered, observable, code-defined path.
Migration posture	API layer delivered as part of the landing-zone build with the production migration sequenced to Middle East region availability — a deliberate, customer-driven region-first ordering.
Lessons & continuation	Migrations are the moment to consolidate API governance: moving identity into Cognito and enforcement into API Gateway during the move costs a fraction of retrofitting it after — and gives every future environment the same front door for free.

AWS services in production

Amazon API GatewayAmazon CognitoAmazon ECS (Fargate)AWS LambdaAmazon CloudFrontAWS WAFAmazon Route 53Amazon RDSAmazon ElastiCacheAmazon RedshiftAmazon MSK