AWS has expanded its API Gateway service, adding support for HTTP APIs and introducing a new pricing tier to go with it.

The cloud giant said that customers were using API Gateway for “everything ranging from simple HTTP proxies to full-blown API management with request transformation, authentication, and validation.”

But, it continued while API Gateway supports REST APIs and WebSocket APIs, “customers have told us they want more features, lower latency, and lower cost.”

Specifically, they wanted “the core features of API Gateway at a lower price along with an easier developer experience.” And so, AWS has given them a preview of HTTP APIs.

“It focuses on delivering enhanced features, improved performance, and an easier developer experience for customers building with API Gateway,” it continued. “Today, we’re launching the first phase, and we will continue to enhance HTTP APIs over the next few months.”

At the same time, HTTP APIs gets its own pricing pattern, at $1.00 per million requests for the first 300 million requests, compared to the $3.50 per million plus data transferred out for REST APIs. For anything over that, the price for HTTP APIs drops to $0.90 per million.

“Most customers will see an average cost saving up to 7o per cent, when compared to API Gateway REST APIs,” said AWS. “In addition, you will see significant performance improvements in the API Gateway service overhead.”

HTTP APIs can be created via the AWS Management Console, CLI, APIs, CloudFormation, SDKs, or the Serverless Application Model (SAM).

Meanwhile, AWS has also announced Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service on its AWS Fargate platform for serverless containers, which it says will relieve customers running Kubernetes-based apps of the drudgery of provisioning and managing the pod infrastructure.