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  5. Istio vs Kong vs fabric8

Istio vs Kong vs fabric8

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kong
Kong
Stacks671
Followers1.5K
Votes139
GitHub Stars42.1K
Forks5.0K
fabric8
fabric8
Stacks37
Followers113
Votes1
GitHub Stars1.8K
Forks498
Istio
Istio
Stacks2.3K
Followers1.5K
Votes54
GitHub Stars37.6K
Forks8.1K

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Advice on Kong, fabric8, Istio

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.

322k views322k
Comments
lyc218
lyc218

Feb 21, 2020

Needs advice

Envoy proxy is widely adopted in many companies for service mesh proxy, but it utilizes BoringSSL by default. Red Hat OpenShift fork envoy branch with their own OpenSSL support, I wonder any other companies are also using envoy-openssl branch for compatibility? How about AWS App Mesh?

Any input would be much appreciated!

42.7k views42.7k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kong
Kong
fabric8
fabric8
Istio
Istio

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.

fabric8 makes it easy to create microservices, build, test and deploy them via Continuous Delivery pipelines then run and manage them with Continuous Improvement and ChatOps.

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.

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;
--
Statistics
GitHub Stars
42.1K
GitHub Stars
1.8K
GitHub Stars
37.6K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
GitHub Forks
498
GitHub Forks
8.1K
Stacks
671
Stacks
37
Stacks
2.3K
Followers
1.5K
Followers
113
Followers
1.5K
Votes
139
Votes
1
Votes
54
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
Pros
  • 1
    Easy to build and automate integration testing
Pros
  • 14
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 9
    Service Mesh
  • 8
    Great flexibility
  • 5
    Resiliency
  • 5
    Ingress controller
Cons
  • 17
    Performance
Integrations
Cassandra
Cassandra
Docker
Docker
Prometheus
Prometheus
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
NGINX
NGINX
Vagrant
Vagrant
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Jenkins
Jenkins
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to Kong, fabric8, Istio?

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.

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.

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