Dapr vs Kong

Overview

Kong

Stacks671

Followers1.5K

Votes139

GitHub Stars42.1K

Forks5.0K

Dapr

Stacks96

Followers336

Votes9

GitHub Stars25.2K

Forks2.0K

Dapr vs Kong: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Dapr and Kong

Dapr and Kong are two different technologies used in building and managing modern applications. Here are the key differences between Dapr and Kong:

Architecture: Dapr is designed as a runtime for microservices, providing a set of building blocks for distributed applications. It enables developers to build microservices using any language or framework and offers features like service-to-service communication and state management. On the other hand, Kong is an API gateway and service mesh built for managing API traffic and implementing security, observability, and traffic control in a centralized manner.
Focus: Dapr focuses on simplifying the development of microservices-based applications. It provides a framework for building stateless and stateful services, with features like message routing, pub/sub, and distributed tracing. Kong, on the other hand, is primarily focused on managing and securing API traffic. It acts as a gateway between clients and services, providing features like authentication, rate limiting, and request/response transformations.
Integration: Dapr is designed to be integrated into existing applications and can work alongside other service frameworks. It provides various SDKs and libraries for different programming languages, allowing developers to easily adopt Dapr in their projects. Kong, on the other hand, is typically deployed as a separate component or service in the infrastructure stack and acts as a centralized control plane for managing API traffic.
Service Mesh Capabilities: Dapr provides limited service mesh capabilities, primarily focused on load balancing and service discovery. It can be used as a sidecar alongside application containers to provide these functionalities. Kong, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive service mesh solution called Kong Mesh, which includes advanced features like traffic routing, observability, and security policies for microservices.
Community and Ecosystem: Dapr is backed by Microsoft and has an active open-source community contributing to its development and ecosystem. It leverages popular technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and Redis. Kong, on the other hand, is developed and maintained by Kong Inc. and also has a strong community support. It integrates with a wide range of technologies and platforms, including Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and more.
Use Cases: Dapr is suitable for building microservices-based applications and can be used in various scenarios like event-driven architectures, IoT, and batch processing. It provides a platform-agnostic approach and can be used in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Kong is best suited for managing API traffic and providing security and control to APIs. It is commonly used in scenarios where API management and governance are required, such as in API-driven architectures and microservices-based applications.

In summary, Dapr is a runtime framework for building microservices with a focus on developer simplicity, while Kong is an API gateway and service mesh solution focused on managing API traffic and providing centralized control over APIs.

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Advice on Kong, Dapr

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Kong	Dapr
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.	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.
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;	Event-driven Pub-Sub system with pluggable providers and at-least-once semantics; Input and Output bindings with pluggable providers; State management with pluggable data stores; Consistent service-to-service discovery and invocation; Opt-in stateful models: Strong/Eventual consistency, First-write/Last-write wins; Cross platform Virtual Actors; Rate limiting; Built-in distributed tracing using Open Telemetry; Runs natively on Kubernetes using a dedicated Operator and CRDs; Supports all programming languages via HTTP and gRPC; Multi-Cloud, open components (bindings, pub-sub, state) from Azure, AWS, GCP; Runs anywhere - as a process or containerized; Lightweight (58MB binary, 4MB physical memory); Runs as a sidecar - removes the need for special SDKs or libraries; Dedicated CLI - developer friendly experience with easy debugging; Clients for Java, Dotnet, Go, Javascript and Python
Statistics
GitHub Stars 42.1K	GitHub Stars 25.2K
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks 2.0K
Stacks 671	Stacks 96
Followers 1.5K	Followers 336
Votes 139	Votes 9
Pros & Cons
Pros 37 Easy to maintain 32 Easy to install 26 Flexible 21 Great performance 7 Api blueprint	Pros 3 Manage inter-service state 2 Zipkin app tracing "for free" 2 MTLS "for free" 2 App dashboard for rapid log overview Cons 1 Additional overhead
Integrations
Cassandra Docker Prometheus Kubernetes PostgreSQL NGINX Vagrant	.NET Core Java Python Microsoft Azure Kubernetes JavaScript Google Cloud Platform Golang

What are some alternatives to Kong, Dapr?

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.

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.

Jersey

It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

Related Comparisons

Dapr vs Kong: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Dapr and Kong

Dapr and Kong are two different technologies used in building and managing modern applications. Here are the key differences between Dapr and Kong:

Architecture: Dapr is designed as a runtime for microservices, providing a set of building blocks for distributed applications. It enables developers to build microservices using any language or framework and offers features like service-to-service communication and state management. On the other hand, Kong is an API gateway and service mesh built for managing API traffic and implementing security, observability, and traffic control in a centralized manner.
Focus: Dapr focuses on simplifying the development of microservices-based applications. It provides a framework for building stateless and stateful services, with features like message routing, pub/sub, and distributed tracing. Kong, on the other hand, is primarily focused on managing and securing API traffic. It acts as a gateway between clients and services, providing features like authentication, rate limiting, and request/response transformations.
Integration: Dapr is designed to be integrated into existing applications and can work alongside other service frameworks. It provides various SDKs and libraries for different programming languages, allowing developers to easily adopt Dapr in their projects. Kong, on the other hand, is typically deployed as a separate component or service in the infrastructure stack and acts as a centralized control plane for managing API traffic.
Service Mesh Capabilities: Dapr provides limited service mesh capabilities, primarily focused on load balancing and service discovery. It can be used as a sidecar alongside application containers to provide these functionalities. Kong, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive service mesh solution called Kong Mesh, which includes advanced features like traffic routing, observability, and security policies for microservices.
Community and Ecosystem: Dapr is backed by Microsoft and has an active open-source community contributing to its development and ecosystem. It leverages popular technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and Redis. Kong, on the other hand, is developed and maintained by Kong Inc. and also has a strong community support. It integrates with a wide range of technologies and platforms, including Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and more.
Use Cases: Dapr is suitable for building microservices-based applications and can be used in various scenarios like event-driven architectures, IoT, and batch processing. It provides a platform-agnostic approach and can be used in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Kong is best suited for managing API traffic and providing security and control to APIs. It is commonly used in scenarios where API management and governance are required, such as in API-driven architectures and microservices-based applications.

Dapr vs Kong

Overview

Dapr vs Kong: What are the differences?