Ambassador vs Kong vs Traefik

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Ambassador

77
187
+ 1
4
Kong

657
1.5K
+ 1
139
Traefik

909
1.2K
+ 1
93

Ambassador vs Kong vs Traefik: What are the differences?

Comparison of Ambassador, Kong, and Traefik

Introduction

In the world of microservices and API gateways, Ambassador, Kong, and Traefik are three popular solutions. While all three serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between them that are worth considering.

  1. Flexibility of Configuration: Ambassador provides a declarative configuration approach using YAML files, allowing users to define the desired state of their systems. Kong, on the other hand, offers a RESTful Admin API for dynamic configuration. Traefik combines both approaches, allowing configuration through static files as well as dynamic providers such as file, Docker, and Kubernetes.

  2. Routing and Load Balancing: Ambassador primarily focuses on L7 (application layer) routing and supports advanced routing features such as path rewriting, traffic splitting, and timeout customization. Kong also offers L7 routing capabilities but emphasizes on plugins for various functionalities. Traefik excels in L7 routing with built-in support for service discovery and circuit breakers.

  3. Scalability and High Availability: Kong and Traefik both provide native solutions for high availability and scaling. Kong can be deployed as a cluster with multiple instances, ensuring fault tolerance and load balancing. Traefik uses a distributed key-value store and supports automatic hot-reload of configurations, enabling seamless scaling and failover. Ambassador currently relies on external tools like Kubernetes to achieve scalability and high availability.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: Kong boasts a large and active community, with a wide range of community-contributed plugins and integrations available. Traefik also has a vibrant community and benefits from being an early adopter of the Docker ecosystem. Ambassador is backed by the open-source community but does not have the same level of ecosystem maturity as Kong and Traefik.

  5. Ingress Controller Support: Ambassador and Traefik are often used as Kubernetes ingress controllers, providing a unified entry point for external traffic into a Kubernetes cluster. Ambassador is designed specifically for Kubernetes and adopts ingress resource conventions. Traefik, being more agnostic, supports multiple ingress controller providers and can be used with other container orchestration platforms as well. Kong, while it can operate as an ingress controller, is not primarily designed for Kubernetes.

  6. Commercial Support and Pricing: Kong offers enterprise-grade support and additional features through its Kong Gateway Enterprise version. Ambassador has a commercial version called Ambassador Edge Stack with enhanced features and support. Traefik also offers a subscription-based Traefik Enterprise Edition with advanced features and support. Pricing models and feature differentiations vary, so organizations need to assess their specific requirements and budget.

In Summary, Ambassador, Kong, and Traefik are all powerful API gateways with distinct characteristics. Ambassador focuses on declarative configurations, Kong emphasizes plugin-based extensibility, while Traefik excels in service discovery and Docker integration. Organizations should evaluate these differences along with their specific requirements to choose the most suitable solution for their API needs.

Decisions about Ambassador, Kong, and Traefik
Gabriel Pa

We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.

We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job

The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server

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Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 287K views

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.

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Pros of Ambassador
Pros of Kong
Pros of Traefik
  • 3
    Edge-proxy
  • 1
    Kubernetes friendly configuration
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
  • 4
    Custom Plugins
  • 3
    Kubernetes-native
  • 2
    Security
  • 2
    Has a good plugin infrastructure
  • 2
    Agnostic
  • 1
    Load balancing
  • 1
    Documentation is clear
  • 1
    Very customizable
  • 20
    Kubernetes integration
  • 18
    Watch service discovery updates
  • 14
    Letsencrypt support
  • 13
    Swarm integration
  • 12
    Several backends
  • 6
    Ready-to-use dashboard
  • 4
    Easy setup
  • 4
    Rancher integration
  • 1
    Mesos integration
  • 1
    Mantl integration

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Cons of Ambassador
Cons of Kong
Cons of Traefik
    Be the first to leave a con
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 7
        Not very performant (fast)
      • 7
        Complicated setup

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      - No public GitHub repository available -
      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Ambassador?

      Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.

      What is Kong?

      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.

      What is Traefik?

      A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

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      What companies use Ambassador?
      What companies use Kong?
      What companies use Traefik?

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      What tools integrate with Ambassador?
      What tools integrate with Kong?
      What tools integrate with Traefik?

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      Blog Posts

      GitHubPythonNode.js+26
      29
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      What are some alternatives to Ambassador, Kong, and Traefik?
      Consul
      Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
      Envoy
      Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
      Istio
      Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.
      Amazon API Gateway
      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.
      Azure API Management
      Today's innovative enterprises are adopting API architectures to accelerate growth. Streamline your work across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with a single place for managing all your APIs.
      See all alternatives