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Conductor vs Kong: What are the differences?
Developers describe Conductor as "A microservices orchestration engine that runs in the cloud *". Conductor is an orchestration engine that runs in the cloud. On the other hand, *Kong** is detailed as "Open Source Microservice & API Management Layer". 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 and Kong can be categorized as "Microservices" tools.
Some of the features offered by Conductor are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Kong provides the following key features:
- 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
Conductor and Kong are both open source tools. Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Conductor with 1.9K GitHub stars and 571 GitHub forks.
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.
Pros of Conductor
Pros of Kong
- Easy to maintain37
- Easy to install32
- Flexible25
- Great performance20
- Api blueprint5
- Custom Plugins4
- Kubernetes-native3
- Security2
- Agnostic2
- Has a good plugin infrastructure2
- Documentation is clear1
- Very customizable1
- Load balancing1