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AWS App Mesh vs Ocelot: What are the differences?
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1. Key differences in Architecture:
- AWS App Mesh is a fully managed service that provides a control plane to manage and monitor the communication between different microservices within a containerized application. It uses Envoy proxies to route and manage traffic between services. On the other hand, Ocelot is an open-source API gateway that acts as a reverse proxy and provides a unified entry point for client requests, controlling and routing them to the appropriate microservices. Unlike App Mesh, Ocelot does not provide a comprehensive control plane or monitoring capabilities out of the box.
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2. Support for container orchestration platforms:
- AWS App Mesh is built to integrate seamlessly with container orchestration platforms like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and AWS Fargate, providing deep integration and native support for Kubernetes APIs. Ocelot, on the other hand, is not tightly coupled with any specific container orchestration platform and can be used with various platforms like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Service Fabric.
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3. Protocol support:
- AWS App Mesh supports a wide range of communication protocols, including HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and gRPC. This enables developers to use different communication patterns and take advantage of various performance optimizations offered by these protocols. Ocelot also supports these protocols, but it may require additional configuration and customization to enable and optimize support for specific protocols.
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4. Monitoring and observability:
- AWS App Mesh provides native integrations with AWS CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, offering comprehensive monitoring and observability features. It allows developers to visualize and analyze the flow of traffic and performance metrics across microservices, enabling better troubleshooting and optimization. Ocelot, being an open-source library, does not provide built-in monitoring and observability features, but it can be integrated with external monitoring tools or custom solutions.
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5. Scalability and elasticity:
- AWS App Mesh is designed to automatically scale and handle high traffic loads by dynamically adjusting the resources allocated to the Envoy proxies. It can take advantage of autoscaling capabilities provided by the underlying container orchestration platform. Ocelot, being a library, relies on the scalability and elasticity features offered by the hosting environment, such as Kubernetes autoscaling or custom scaling solutions.
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6. Vendor lock-in:
- AWS App Mesh is a vendor-specific solution that is tightly integrated with other AWS services. This can result in potential vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to different cloud providers or use on-premises infrastructure. Ocelot, being an open-source library, offers more flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in as it can be used with different cloud providers or self-managed infrastructure.
In Summary, AWS App Mesh offers a fully managed service with comprehensive control plane, monitoring, and native integrations with AWS services, while Ocelot is an open-source API gateway that provides a unified entry point for microservices and can be used with different container orchestration platforms, but with limited built-in monitoring and observability features.
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.
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.
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.
Pros of AWS App Mesh
Pros of Ocelot
- Straightforward documentation1
- Simple configuration1