Tyk VS Kong

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:

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.