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  5. Conductor vs Kong

Conductor vs Kong

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kong
Kong
Stacks671
Followers1.5K
Votes139
GitHub Stars42.1K
Forks5.0K
Conductor
Conductor
Stacks66
Followers122
Votes0
GitHub Stars12.8K
Forks2.3K

Conductor vs Kong: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This Markdown code addresses the key differences between Conductor and Kong, two popular technologies used for API management.

1. **Architecture**: Conductor is a workflow orchestration engine that focuses on managing and executing complex business processes, while Kong is an API gateway that acts as a middleware layer between clients and servers to manage API traffic and security.
2. **Use Case**: Conductor is primarily utilized for workflow automation and managing dependencies between tasks in a distributed environment, whereas Kong is designed for API traffic management, authentication, authorization, and rate limiting.
3. **Deployment**: Conductor can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, offering flexibility in where workflows are orchestrated, while Kong is typically deployed as a gateway in front of APIs to manage incoming and outgoing traffic.
4. **Plugins**: Kong provides a wide range of plugins for extending functionality, such as logging, monitoring, and authentication mechanisms, whereas Conductor focuses more on workflow-related features and lacks the extensive plugin ecosystem of Kong.
5. **Scalability**: Conductor is optimized for horizontal scaling to handle large-scale workflows and complex dependencies, whereas Kong is built for high availability, performance, and scalability to efficiently manage API traffic in distributed systems.
6. **Community Support**: Kong has a vibrant open-source community with frequent updates, extensive documentation, and community-contributed plugins, while Conductor has a smaller but active community, which may impact the availability of resources and support. 

In Summary, Conductor and Kong differ in their architecture, use cases, deployment options, plugin ecosystems, scalability, and community support.

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Advice on Kong, Conductor

Prateek
Prateek

Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Kong
Kong
Conductor
Conductor

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.

Conductor is an orchestration engine that runs in the cloud.

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;
Allow creating complex process / business flows in which individual task is implemented by a microservice.;A JSON DSL based blueprint defines the execution flow.;Provide visibility and traceability into the these process flows.;Expose control semantics around pause, resume, restart, etc allowing for better devops experience.;Allow greater reuse of existing microservices providing an easier path for onboarding.;User interface to visualize the process flows.;Ability to synchronously process all the tasks when needed.;Ability to scale millions of concurrently running process flows.;Backed by a queuing service abstracted from the clients.;Be able to operate on HTTP or other transports e.g. gRPC.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
42.1K
GitHub Stars
12.8K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
2.3K
Stacks
671
Stacks
66
Followers
1.5K
Followers
122
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
Cassandra
Docker
Docker
Prometheus
Prometheus
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
NGINX
NGINX
Vagrant
Vagrant
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Kong, Conductor?

Istio

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

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 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

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

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

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

ArangoDB Foxx

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

Dapr

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

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

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.

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