Overview

Kong

Stacks650

Followers1.5K

Votes139

GitHub Stars42.1K

Forks5.0K

AWS App Mesh

Stacks24

Followers205

Votes0

AWS App Mesh vs Kong: What are the differences?

Introduction

AWS App Mesh and Kong are two popular tools used for managing and securing microservices architectures. While both offer similar functionality, they have some key differences that make them unique in their own ways.

Deployment Model: AWS App Mesh is a fully managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows you to easily monitor and control communications between microservices. It integrates seamlessly with AWS services and is hosted on the AWS Cloud. On the other hand, Kong is an open-source solution that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, giving you more flexibility in choosing your deployment environment.
Service Discovery: AWS App Mesh has built-in service discovery capabilities that automatically register and track your services as they scale up or down. It uses the Envoy proxy to collect metrics and traces, providing you with valuable insights into your microservices architecture. Kong, on the other hand, relies on external service discovery mechanisms, such as Consul or etcd, to manage service registration and discovery.
API Gateway: Kong is primarily known for its API gateway capabilities, allowing you to manage and secure your APIs. It provides features like authentication, rate limiting, request/response transformations, and more. AWS App Mesh, on the other hand, focuses more on managing the communication between microservices rather than being a dedicated API gateway. It can be used in conjunction with AWS API Gateway for API management.
Polyglot Support: Kong supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, making it a versatile choice for developers. It provides SDKs and plugins for popular languages like JavaScript, Python, Go, and more. AWS App Mesh, on the other hand, is language-agnostic and can be used with any programming language that supports the Envoy proxy. This gives you more flexibility in choosing the technologies for your microservices.
Integration with AWS Services: As an AWS service, App Mesh integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and more. This allows you to leverage the full power of the AWS ecosystem when building your microservices architecture. Kong, being an open-source solution, can also be integrated with AWS services, but it requires more manual configuration and setup.
Pricing: AWS App Mesh is a managed service that comes with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You only pay for the resources you use, making it a cost-effective choice for small to large-scale deployments. Kong, being an open-source tool, is free to use, but you are responsible for managing and scaling the infrastructure it runs on. This may incur additional costs depending on your deployment requirements.

In summary, AWS App Mesh is a fully managed service provided by AWS that focuses on managing communication between microservices in an AWS environment. It offers built-in service discovery, deep integration with AWS services, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Kong, on the other hand, is an open-source solution that can be deployed anywhere and offers more flexibility in terms of deployment options and programming language support. It is primarily known for its API gateway capabilities and is free to use, but requires more manual setup and management.

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Advice on Kong, AWS App Mesh

Prateek

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

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.

321k views321k

Comments

Mohammed

CTO at Famcare

Jan 16, 2020

Needs advice

One of our applications is currently migrating to AWS, and we need to make a decision between using AWS API Gateway with AWS App Mesh, or Kong API Gateway with Kuma.

Some people advise us to benefit from AWS managed services, while others raise the vendor lock issue. So, I need your advice on that, and if there is any other important factor rather than vendor locking that I must take into consideration.

38.7k views38.7k

Comments

lyc218

Feb 21, 2020

Needs advice

Envoy proxy is widely adopted in many companies for service mesh proxy, but it utilizes BoringSSL by default. Red Hat OpenShift fork envoy branch with their own OpenSSL support, I wonder any other companies are also using envoy-openssl branch for compatibility? How about AWS App Mesh?

Any input would be much appreciated!

42.7k views42.7k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kong	AWS App Mesh
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.	AWS App Mesh is a service mesh based on the Envoy proxy that makes it easy to monitor and control containerized microservices. App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and helping to ensure high-availability for your applications. App Mesh gives you consistent visibility and network traffic controls for every microservice in an application. You can use App Mesh with Amazon ECS (using the Amazon EC2 launch type), Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes on AWS.
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; IP-restriction: Whitelist or blacklist IPs that can make requests; Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens; Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication; Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly; CORS: Enable cross-origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked; Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins;	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 42.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 650	Stacks 24
Followers 1.5K	Followers 205
Votes 139	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 37 Easy to maintain 32 Easy to install 26 Flexible 21 Great performance 7 Api blueprint	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Cassandra Docker Prometheus Kubernetes PostgreSQL NGINX Vagrant	Amazon EKS Amazon EC2 Kubernetes Envoy Amazon EC2 Container Service

What are some alternatives to Kong, AWS App Mesh?

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.

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

Express Gateway

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Dapr

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

linkerd

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.