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Amazon API Gateway vs Kong: What are the differences?
Developers describe Amazon API Gateway as "Create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale". Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management. On the other hand, Kong is detailed as "Open Source Microservice & API Management Layer". Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.
Amazon API Gateway belongs to "API Tools" category of the tech stack, while Kong can be primarily classified under "Microservices Tools".
Some of the features offered by Amazon API Gateway are:
- Build, Deploy and Manage APIs
- Resiliency
- API Lifecycle Management
On the other hand, Kong provides the following key features:
- Logging: Log requests and responses to your system over TCP, UDP or to disk
- OAuth2.0: Add easily an OAuth2.0 authentication to your APIs
- Monitoring: Live monitoring provides key load and performance server metrics
"AWS Integration" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon API Gateway over the competitors, whereas "Easy to maintain" was stated as the key factor in picking Kong.
Kong is an open source tool with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kong's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon API Gateway has a broader approval, being mentioned in 170 company stacks & 65 developers stacks; compared to Kong, which is listed in 50 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.
Istio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn-keyIstio based on powerful Envoy whereas Kong based on Nginx. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio has an inbuilt turn key solution with Rancher whereas Kong completely lacks here. Traffic distribution in Istio can be done via canary, a/b, shadowing, HTTP headers, ACL, whitelist whereas in Kong it's limited to canary, ACL, blue-green, proxy caching. Istio has amazing community support which is visible via Github stars or releases when comparing both.
Pros of Amazon API Gateway
- AWS Integration37
- Websockets6
- Serverless1
Pros of Kong
- Easy to maintain37
- Easy to install32
- Flexible25
- Great performance20
- Api blueprint5
- Custom Plugins4
- Kubernetes-native3
- Security2
- Agnostic2
- Has a good plugin infrastructure2
- Documentation is clear1
- Very customizable1
- Load balancing1
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Cons of Amazon API Gateway
- Less expensive1
- No websocket broadcast1
Cons of Kong
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What is Amazon API Gateway?
What is Kong?
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