apisix-dashboard VS helm

With various access control models and implementation methods available, constructing an authorization system for backend service APIs can still be challenging. However, the ultimate goal is to ensure that the correct individual has appropriate access to the relevant resource. In this article, we will discuss how to enable the Role-based access control(RBAC) authorization model for your API with open-source API Gateway Apache APISIX and Open Policy Agent (OPA).

The API Create phase is the first stage in the API product lifecycle management process where you design, orchestrate, transform, document, and test your API. At this stage, modern API gateways like Apache APISIX can be helpful to build your API from scratch or import API definitions from a range of sources like OpenAPI YAML/JSON structure to register Route and Upstreams.

Apache APISIX is an API Gateway. By default, it stores its configuration in etcd, a distributed key-value store - the same one used by Kubernetes. Note that in real-world scenarios, we should set up etcd clustering to improve the resiliency of the solution. For this post, we will limit ourselves to a single etcd instance. Apache APISIX offers an admin API via HTTP endpoints. Finally, the gateway forwards calls from the client to an upstream. Here's an overview of the architecture and the required certificates:

One of the key features of modern API Gateways such as Apache APISIX is its support for GraphQL APIs. APISIX makes it easy to manage and scale GraphQL APIs using its flexible configuration system and powerful plugins. One such plugin is the degrapghql plugin, which allows us to convert the GraphQL API into a REST API. In this post, we will explore this feature with an example.

Secure your API: Use an to secure API Gateway by adding authentication, rate limiting, and other security features. It reduces the number of exposed APIs, organizations can reduce surfaces of attacks.

An alternative exists, though, if you're using an API Gateway. I'll describe how to do it with Apache APISIX, but perhaps other gateways can do the same. grpc-transcode is a plugin that allows transcoding REST calls to gRPC and back again.

I've used Kong but currently evaluating APISix as it's a more 'free/open' API gateway.

In this article, we will show you how to create a custom connector for the open-source Apache APISIX API Gateway in Power Platform as an alternative to Azure API Management in case you are building up additional components to an existing system with usable APIs and your system's infrastructure is hosted on-premises or on other cloud services provider rather than Azure.

Here's how to do it with Apache APISIX.

Apache APISIX is an open-source, high-performance API gateway built on top of Nginx. One of its powerful features is the ability to create serverless functions, which are small, stateless programs that can extend the functionality of Apache APISIX. In this article, we'll cover the basics of the Apache APISIX serverless plugin and how it can be used to trigger serverless functions in response to events.

Applying Kubernetes manifests individually is problematic because files can get overlooked. Packaging your applications as Helm charts lets you version your manifests and easily repeat deployments into different environments. Helm tracks the state of each deployment as a "release" in your cluster.

helm

Explanation here: https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/12681#issuecomment-19593...

Looks like it's a bug in Helm, but actually isn't Helm's fault, the issue was introduced by Fedora Linux.

Helm (Get from here https://helm.sh/)

It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.

Kubernetes orchestrates deployments and manages resources through yaml configuration files. While Kubernetes supports a wide array of resources and configurations, our aim in this tutorial is to maintain simplicity. For the sake of clarity and ease of understanding, we will use yaml configurations with hardcoded values. This method simplifies the learning process but isn’t ideal for production environments due to the need for manual updates with each new deployment. Although there are methods to streamline and automate this process, such as using Helm charts or bash scripts, we’ll not delve into those techniques to keep the tutorial manageable and avoid fatigue — you might be quite tired by that point!

Helm is a package manager that automates Kubernetes applications' creation, packaging, configuration, and deployment by combining your configuration files into a single reusable package. This eliminates the requirement to create the mentioned Kubernetes resources by ourselves since they have been implemented within the Helm chart. All we need to do is configure it as needed to match our requirements. From the public Helm chart repository, we can get the charts for common software packages like Consul, Jenkins SonarQube, etc. We can also create our own Helm charts for our custom applications so that we don’t need to repeat ourselves and simplify deployments.

We can search for charts https://helm.sh/ . Charts can be pulled(downloaded) and optionally unpacked(untar).

Generally I felt as if I was diving in the deepest of waters without the correct equipement and that was horrifying. Unfortunately to me, I had to dive even deeper before getting equiped with tools like ArgoCD, and k8slens. I had to start working with... HELM.

Within the architecture of Cyclops, a central component is the Helm engine. Helm is very popular within the Kubernetes community; chances are you have already run into it. The popularity of Helm plays to Cyclops's strength because of its straightforward integration.