apisix-ingress-controller VS application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress

This post shows how to implement it with Apache APISIX.

APISIX Ingress Controller is a tool focused on API management, offering high performance and flexible configuration options. If you require more complex routing rules, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and other advanced features, APISIX Ingress Controller may be a better choice. It provides a rich plugin system, allowing integration of plugins through APISIX Ingress CRD using declarative configuration to handle authentication, authorization, monitoring, logging, and other functionalities. This enriches the capabilities of APISIX Ingress Controller and simplifies configuration.

In this post, I'd like to describe how to fix some of them via the Apache APISIX API Gateway.

In the era of digitization, the availability and stability of services are crucial for the success of enterprises. As a key component of microservices architecture, the API gateway plays a significant role. APISIX, an open-source API gateway platform, ensures the continuity and stability of services through its health check mechanism.

Next February will mark the two-year milestone that I'm working for: API7.ai on Apache APISIX. I'm still very pleased about both. It allows me to do things I like a lot, such as writing posts and giving talks.

In early 2021, I started to work on the Apache APISIX project. I have to admit that I had never heard about it before. In this post, I'd like to introduce some Apache projects that are less well-known than HTTPD or Kafka.

Apache APISIX is an API Gateway, which builds upon the OpenResty reverse-proxy to offer a plugin-based architecture. The main benefit of such an architecture is that it brings structure to the configuration of routes. It's a help at scale, when managing hundreds or thousands of routes.

API resilience is about building robust APIs that can withstand a variety of challenges, ensuring that they continue to function effectively. API Gateways play a key role in this, acting as the entry point for external requests and managing the communication between different services by taking into account common API resilience patterns. One of the popular open-source API Gateways, Apache APISIX, provides a variety of features to enhance the resilience and robustness of APIs. In this article, we will explore 10 common API resilience design patterns and how they can be implemented using APISIX.

Unfortunately in some cases it works poorly. For more insights, read this - https://github.com/Azure/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress/issues/1124

My main concern is about zero-downtime deployments - https://github.com/Azure/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress/blob/master/docs/how-tos/minimize-downtime-during-deployments.md

However, you better read and understand some specific behaviors of AGIC which are caused by its architecture - https://github.com/Azure/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress/blob/master/docs/how-tos/minimize-downtime-during-deployments.md & https://github.com/Azure/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress/issues/1124

application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress (Azure only)

Probably something like this https://azure.github.io/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress/

AKS Application Gateway Ingress Controller is an ingress controller that configures the Azure Application Gateway.

AGIC has a lack of annotations that I find nginx+ offers like server snippets and custom headers. granted you can write re-write rules for AGIC with the help of the portal, it resets everything if one pod fails and this is a major showstopper for me. More info about the exact issue I'm talking about is in this issue. Apart from this, like the previous comments, the extra WAF rules and compliances offered makes AGIC a good choice if you don't have any extra header addition requirements like i do.

If you want Azure to manage ingress, you can use Azure application gateway and application gateway ingress controller (agic). However, if you want a public/private combination, fox example if you have 8 microservices out of which you want 6 to have private endpoint and 2 to have public endpoint over https, then it cannot be dones as agic only supports one ip per port. Also one agic can only use one application gateway (With auto management, meaning it automatically manages the listeners, https settings, backendpools, probes etc. on app gateway). If you it as shared gateway, then you need to manage application gateway manually (with az cli). Also, its github page has good how tos (https://github.com/Azure/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress).