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Advice on AWS App Mesh and Kubernetes
Mohammed Shurrab
CTO at Famcare · | 2 upvotes · 30.2K views
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.
Replies (2)
thefosk
The benefit of using Kuma + Kong Gateway are:
- Feature-set: Kong + Kuma provide an end-to-end solution for both APIM and Service Mesh with a feature-set, and a performance, that is not matched by AWS services. In addition to this you can extend Kong Gateway with 70+ plugins out of the box and choose between 500+ plugins from the community to cover every use-case. In comparison, the feature-set of AWS API Gateway is quite limited and basic.
- Performance: Especially in the case of Kong Gateway, performance has always been a top priority for the project (more performance deliver more reliable applications). In some benchmarks the latency added by AWS API Gateway can be 200x more than what you would achieve with Kong Gateway natively which has been hand-crafted for maximum throughput.
- Cost: While cloud vendors like AWS make it very easy to get up and running with their services at a lower initial cost, that cost ramps up very quickly (exponentially) as the number of requests are increasing. With Kong GW you don't have this problem, since you can run tens of thousands of concurrent requests on a small EC2 instance (or Kubernetes Ingress, via the native K8s ingress controller for Kong Gateway).
- Portability: You can replicate your infrastructure on any other cloud, or on your development machines with ease. Want to run your gateway + mesh on your local Kubernetes cluster? You can do that. Want to run your infrastructure on another cloud provider? You can do that. Strategically you have full ownership of your infrastructure and its future. When it comes to Kuma, you can also run a Mesh on VM-based workloads in addition to Kubernetes (Kuma is universal).
- And much more.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO of Kong.
Amarnath RC
Program Architect at Mindtree · | 2 upvotes · 30.2K views
AWS App Mesh is useful when your micro services are deployed across Ec2 , EKS or ECS. Assume you are in process of migrating microservices from ec2 instances to ecs, its easy to switch using Virtual router configuration. As App Mesh is managed service and easy to bring up ,its worth giving it a try for your use case before choosing Kuma or any other tool.
Decisions about AWS App Mesh and Kubernetes
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 5.9M views
Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
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Learn MorePros of AWS App Mesh
Pros of Kubernetes
Pros of AWS App Mesh
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Pros of Kubernetes
- Leading docker container management solution163
- Simple and powerful128
- Open source105
- Backed by google76
- The right abstractions58
- Scale services25
- Replication controller20
- Permission managment11
- Simple8
- Cheap8
- Supports autoscaling8
- Self-healing5
- No cloud platform lock-in5
- Reliable5
- Scalable4
- Open, powerful, stable4
- Quick cloud setup4
- Promotes modern/good infrascture practice4
- Backed by Red Hat3
- A self healing environment with rich metadata3
- Captain of Container Ship3
- Cloud Agnostic3
- Custom and extensibility3
- Runs on azure3
- Gke2
- Everything of CaaS2
- Sfg2
- Expandable2
- Golang2
- Easy setup2
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Cons of AWS App Mesh
Cons of Kubernetes
Cons of AWS App Mesh
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Cons of Kubernetes
- Steep learning curve15
- Poor workflow for development15
- Orchestrates only infrastructure8
- High resource requirements for on-prem clusters4
- Too heavy for simple systems2
- Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)1
- More moving parts to secure1
- Additional Technology Overhead1
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What is AWS App Mesh?
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.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
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What tools integrate with AWS App Mesh?
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What are some alternatives to AWS App Mesh and Kubernetes?
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.
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.
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.
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.