Tyk VS apisix-docker

Tyk: An open-source API Gateway that is fast and scalable, running on either its own standalone server or alongside your existing nginx installation.

We're a friendly bunch at https://github.com/TykTechnologies/tyk - I'll gladly pick up onboarding contributors for some meaningful tasks, if you'd like to ease into it. Lots of tech debt to address, so it's more maintenance work, testing, introducing DDD, etc.

Traditional way to try an open-source project Tyk is an open source API gateway project. Organizations can control access to the gateway and protect the security of enterprises and organizations. To start with, I chose the traditional way, using docker-compose to install it, which requires the Git and Docker environment on the computer.

Amazon API Gateway AWS provides fully managed service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing REST, HTTP, and WebSocket where developers can create APIs that access AWS or other web services, as well as data stored in the AWS Cloud. Kong API Gateway Kong Gateway is an open-source, lightweight API gateway optimized for microservices, delivering unparalleled latency performance and scalability. If you just want the basics, this option will work for you. It is scalable easily horizontally by adding more nodes. It supports large and variable workloads with very low latency. Other API Gateways Apigee API Gateway MuleSoft Tyk.io Akana SwaggerHub Azure API Gateway Express API Gateway Karken D Choosing the right API gateway Some of the common baseline for evaluation criteria include simplicity, open-source vs propriety, scalability & flexibility, security, features, community, administrative (support, monitoring & deployment), environment provisioning(installation, configuration, hosting offering), pricing, and documentation. API Composition / Aggregation Some API requests in API Gateway map directly to single service API which can be served by routing request to the corresponding microservice. However, in the case of complex API operations that requires results from several microservices can be served by API composition/aggregation (a scatter-gather mechanism). In case of dependency of one another service where synchronous communication is required, the chained composition pattern has to be followed. The composition layer has to support a significant portion of ESB/integration capabilities such as transformations, orchestration, resiliency, and stability patterns. A root container is deployed with the special distributor and aggregator functionalities (or microservices). The distributor is responsible for breaking down into granular tasks and distributing those tasks to microservice instances. The aggregator is responsible for aggregating the results derived by business workflow from composed microservice. API Gateway and Aggregation API gateway with added features results in overambitious gateways that encourage designs that continue to be difficult to test and deploy. It is highly recommended to avoid aggregation and data transformation in the API Gateway. Domain smarts are better suited to be done in application code that follows the defined software development practices. Netflix API Gateway, Zuul 2 removed a lot of the business logic from Gateway that they had in Zuul to origin systems. For more details, refer here. Service Mesh and API Gateway Service mesh in microservices is a configurable network infrastructure layer that handles interprocess communication. This is akin to what is often termed as sidecar proxy or sidecar gateway. It provides a lot of functionalities such as:

This project leverages existing the pre-defined Docker Compose configuration file to set up, deploy, and run APISIX, etcd, Prometheus, and other services with a single command. First, clone the apisix-docker repo on GitHub, open it in your favorite editor, navigate to the example folder, and start the project by simply running docker compose up command in a terminal from the project root folder.

We will leverage the existing file-proxy demo project on GitHub. It has a quite similar structure to the existing Apisix docker example repo, only we removed unnecessary files to keep the demo simple. The project has 3 folders, docker-compose.yml, and sample openapi.yaml files.

git clone https://github.com/apache/apisix-docker.git

This first thing you clone the apisix-docker project repo from GitHub:

Apache APISIX Apache APISIX is an open source, dynamic, real-time, high-performance cloud native API gateway. APISIX provides rich traffic management features such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, canary release, circuit breaking, authentication, observability, and more. Official website https://apisix.apache.org/ GitHub projects APISIX (the core): https://github.com/apache/apisix GitHub - apache/apisix: The Cloud-Native API Gateway GitHub - apache/apisix-dashboard: Dashboard for Apache APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-website: Apache APISIX Website GitHub - apache/apisix-docker: the docker for Apache APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-go-plugin-runner: Go Plugin Runner for APISIX GitHub - apache/apisix-java-plugin-runner: APISIX Plugin Runner in Java GitHub - apache/apisix-python-plugin-runner: Apache APISIX Python plugin runner GitHub - apache/apisix-helm-chart: Apache APISIX Helm Chart GitHub - apache/apisix-ingress-controller: ingress controller for K8s

We made use of Apache APISIX docker compose repo where we deployed several components in one run and we demonstrated how the API Gateway can be used to manage sample ASP.NET Core application to retrieve product data using Product microservice's API. Also, you learned how to enable limit-count plugin for the API endpoint. There are many other built-in plugins available in Apache APISIX, you can check them on Plugin Hub page. Basically, APISIX can be a lightweight middleware API Gateway regardless of which programming language, frameworks, tools, or platforms you are developing a microservice or application.

In this demo, we are using Apache APISIX Docker repo and it contains an example docker-compose.yaml file and with other config files that makes straightforward to start APISIX using docker compose. We try out this example:

APISIX uses etcd to save and synchronize configuration. Before installing APISIX, you need to install etcd on your machine. It would be installed automatically if you choose the Apache APISIX Docker compose mode, you will learn more about on the next blog post Use Docker Compose to deploy containerized APISIX to AWS ECS.

The apisix-security-java-spring project makes use of the similar example APISIX docker compose template.

✔️ Create an Azure resource group. ✔️ Configure Azure Container Instances. ✔️ Create a Azure context for Docker to offload Apisix and etcd containers execution to ACI. ✔️ Get Apache APISIX example source code for Docker from GitHub. ✔️ Modify Docker compose file there. ✔️ Setup volumes in Azure Storage Account with Azure File Share. ✔️ Add APISIX config files to Azure File Share. ✔️ Bring up APISIX in Azure Container Instances. ✔️ Verify APISIX running. ✔️ Cleanup after you finish.