Kong VS Metabase

Kong: A cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed Microservice Abstraction Layer (also known as an API Gateway or API Middleware). Made available as an open-source project in 2015, its core functionality is written in Lua and it runs on the nginx web server.

OPeNsOuRcE. Good time to switch to Kong, better option anyways.

Sounds like you want an API gateway? What about Kong?

Unquestionably no, Kong is "OpenResty plus a management plane" and they're Apache 2: https://github.com/kong/kong#license

Kong (https://konghq.com) | Gateway Senior Engineer | REMOTE Europe | Full-time

The Kong Gateway is an API Management solution, which serves as a foundation for many other solutions by the company. The business model is open-core: an Open Source solution exists (https://github.com/kong/kong), and there's an Enterprise version with more features and dedicated support.

The tech stack is a modified Openresty with of Lua code on top. The ideal candidate would be someone who is already familiar with Kong. Alternatively, if you are familiar with Openresty or other API management solution, we also would love to talk with you.

I am personally interested in finding people to join me in the European Gateway Team. The role involves adding features, fixing bugs, and collaborating with other teams. Here's that position:

https://jobs.lever.co/kong/c1a2b204-45a8-4c19-9cd4-d9824a778...

We have many projects and many teams all around the world (current headcount is ~450), using other technologies like Node in the Kong Manager or Go in the Koko project, and we are constantly looking for people. Please visit our careers page to find out more!

https://konghq.com/careers/

Kong Gateway allows the complexity of service-tier APIs to be reduced to a collection of endpoints (or URIs) focused on meeting a collection of business needs and functionality. Often-duplicated components (like authentication, logging, and security) are handled by the gateway and can be removed from the service-tier design.

I am seeing different companies taking different approach. I am not sure anymore where each should be actually used. On top of that tech like Kong make me question whether API Gateway should be one thing for all. Some perspective into this would be really appreciated.

Remote Code Execution via H2

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

(nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.

Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).