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  5. Express Gateway vs Zuul

Express Gateway vs Zuul

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Zuul
Zuul
Stacks392
Followers385
Votes8
Express Gateway
Express Gateway
Stacks62
Followers167
Votes10

Express Gateway vs Zuul: What are the differences?

Express Gateway and Zuul are both API gateway solutions that provide similar functionalities in managing and routing API traffic. However, there are key differences between the two that set them apart in terms of their features and capabilities.
  1. Performance and Scalability: Express Gateway is built on top of Node.js, which is known for its lightweight and efficient nature, offering high performance and scalability. On the other hand, Zuul is built on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which can be resource-intensive and may not be as performant or scalable as Express Gateway in certain scenarios.

  2. Configuration and Customization: Express Gateway allows for a flexible and customizable configuration through a declarative YAML-based syntax. It provides a wide range of plugins and middleware options, making it easier to extend and customize the gateway's functionality according to specific requirements. In contrast, Zuul's configuration is typically done through a properties file or code-based configuration, which may require additional development effort for customization.

  3. Service Discovery and Load Balancing: Express Gateway has built-in support for service discovery using popular tools like Consul, enabling automatic route resolution to backend services. It also supports various load balancing algorithms out of the box, such as round-robin, least connections, and IP hash. In comparison, while Zuul can utilize service discovery and load balancing through third-party plugins or libraries, it doesn't offer native support for these features.

  4. Security and Authorization: Express Gateway provides granular security and authorization capabilities through its built-in plugins, such as JWT authentication, rate limiting, and OAuth support. It also integrates well with authentication providers like Auth0 and Keycloak. Zuul, on the other hand, relies on Spring Security for security and access control, which provides similar functionality but may require more configuration and development effort to achieve the same level of granularity.

  5. Monitoring and Analytics: Express Gateway provides out-of-the-box integration with popular monitoring and analytics tools like Prometheus and Grafana, offering real-time insights into API traffic, performance metrics, and error tracking. In contrast, Zuul may require additional configuration and setup to enable similar monitoring and analytics capabilities.

  6. Ecosystem and Community: Express Gateway has a growing ecosystem of plugins and extensions contributed by the community, providing additional features and integrations. It also has an active community of developers and contributors that actively support and improve the gateway. While Zuul also has a vibrant community due to its adoption within the Spring ecosystem, it may not have the same level of plugin availability and community support as Express Gateway.

In Summary, Express Gateway and Zuul differ in terms of performance, configuration/customization options, service discovery/load balancing support, security/authorization capabilities, monitoring/analytics integrations, and ecosystem/community support. These differences should be considered when choosing an API gateway solution based on specific requirements and preferences.

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Detailed Comparison

Zuul
Zuul
Express Gateway
Express Gateway

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.

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.

-
Authentication;Authorization;API Management;Microservices;JSON Web Token (JWT);OAuth2;Custom Plugins;Consumer Mgmt;YAML Driven; REST API;Pipelines;Built-in Policies;Hot Reload and Restart;Actions & Conditions;
Statistics
Stacks
392
Stacks
62
Followers
385
Followers
167
Votes
8
Votes
10
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 8
    Load blancing
Pros
  • 4
    Microservices, Body manipulation
  • 3
    Custom Plugins
  • 3
    Amazing api gwy. Easy and powerful configuration
Cons
  • 2
    Deprecated
Integrations
No integrations available
Prometheus
Prometheus
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Docker
Docker
Auth0
Auth0
StatsD
StatsD
Node.js
Node.js
Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service
ExpressJS
ExpressJS

What are some alternatives to Zuul, Express Gateway?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jersey

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.

Ocelot

Ocelot

It is aimed at people using .NET running a micro services / service oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports. It manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service.

Micro

Micro

Micro is a framework for cloud native development. Micro addresses the key requirements for building cloud native services. It leverages the microservices architecture pattern and provides a set of services which act as the building blocks

Claudia

Claudia

Claudia helps you deploy Node.js microservices to Amazon Web Services easily. It automates and simplifies deployment workflows and error prone tasks, so you can focus on important problems and not have to worry about AWS service quirks.

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