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Kuma vs fabric8: What are the differences?
Deployment Approach: One key difference between Kuma and fabric8 is their deployment approach. Kuma focuses on simplifying and abstracting service mesh deployment for users, making it easier to manage and scale microservices. On the other hand, fabric8 offers a more comprehensive platform that includes not only service mesh capabilities but also tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Traffic Routing: Another significant difference is in how they handle traffic routing. Kuma provides advanced traffic routing features, including traffic splitting and mirroring, to fine-tune how traffic flows through the service mesh. In contrast, fabric8 offers more basic traffic routing capabilities, focusing more on facilitating developer productivity and collaboration.
Built-in Observability: Kuma comes with built-in observability features, such as tracing and monitoring, to help users gain insights into the behavior of their microservices. In comparison, fabric8 provides basic observability tools but also integrates with external monitoring and logging systems for more comprehensive observability.
Community Support: The level of community support differs between Kuma and fabric8. Kuma is supported by a dedicated community that focuses on developing and improving the service mesh platform. On the other hand, fabric8 has a larger community that contributes to the overall development of the platform, including its CI/CD capabilities.
Integration Ecosystem: Kuma has a strong focus on integrating with various platforms and tools to provide a seamless experience for users. This includes integrations with popular cloud providers, Kubernetes distributions, and monitoring systems. In contrast, fabric8 offers a more standalone experience, with fewer integrations out of the box.
Performance Optimization: Kuma puts a strong emphasis on performance optimization, providing features like load balancing and circuit breaking to ensure high availability and reliability of microservices. Fabric8, while also prioritizing performance, may not offer the same level of optimization features as Kuma in certain scenarios.
In Summary, Kuma and fabric8 differ in their deployment approach, traffic routing capabilities, built-in observability, community support, integration ecosystem, and performance optimization.
One of our applications is currently migrating to AWS, and we need to make a decision between using AWS API Gateway with AWS App Mesh, or Kong API Gateway with Kuma.
Some people advise us to benefit from AWS managed services, while others raise the vendor lock issue. So, I need your advice on that, and if there is any other important factor rather than vendor locking that I must take into consideration.
The benefit of using Kuma + Kong Gateway are:
- Feature-set: Kong + Kuma provide an end-to-end solution for both APIM and Service Mesh with a feature-set, and a performance, that is not matched by AWS services. In addition to this you can extend Kong Gateway with 70+ plugins out of the box and choose between 500+ plugins from the community to cover every use-case. In comparison, the feature-set of AWS API Gateway is quite limited and basic.
- Performance: Especially in the case of Kong Gateway, performance has always been a top priority for the project (more performance deliver more reliable applications). In some benchmarks the latency added by AWS API Gateway can be 200x more than what you would achieve with Kong Gateway natively which has been hand-crafted for maximum throughput.
- Cost: While cloud vendors like AWS make it very easy to get up and running with their services at a lower initial cost, that cost ramps up very quickly (exponentially) as the number of requests are increasing. With Kong GW you don't have this problem, since you can run tens of thousands of concurrent requests on a small EC2 instance (or Kubernetes Ingress, via the native K8s ingress controller for Kong Gateway).
- Portability: You can replicate your infrastructure on any other cloud, or on your development machines with ease. Want to run your gateway + mesh on your local Kubernetes cluster? You can do that. Want to run your infrastructure on another cloud provider? You can do that. Strategically you have full ownership of your infrastructure and its future. When it comes to Kuma, you can also run a Mesh on VM-based workloads in addition to Kubernetes (Kuma is universal).
- And much more.
Disclaimer: I am the CTO of Kong.
AWS App Mesh is useful when your micro services are deployed across Ec2 , EKS or ECS. Assume you are in process of migrating microservices from ec2 instances to ecs, its easy to switch using Virtual router configuration. As App Mesh is managed service and easy to bring up ,its worth giving it a try for your use case before choosing Kuma or any other tool.
Pros of fabric8
- Easy to build and automate integration testing1
