goa vs Kong: What are the differences?
goa: A design driven approach for building microservices in Go. goa is a framework for building microservices in Go using a unique design-first approach. goa provides a novel approach for developing microservices that saves time when working on independent services and helps with keeping the overall system consistent; Kong: 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.
goa and Kong belong to "Microservices Tools" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by goa are:
- Creating a service with goa starts with the design. The goa DSL lets you describe the global properties, types and endpoints that make up the service API. The apidsl package docs provides a quick reference to all the DSL functions.
- Once the design of the API is in place goagen generates the corresponding data structures, validation code and handlers. Handlers are defined as interface methods. Implementing the service is thus as simple as implementing the generated interfaces.
- The best part about the goa DSL is that the engine is completely decoupled. Plugins can implement custom DSLs to extend the concepts described in the design. Plugins can also generate arbitrary outputs.
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
goa and Kong are both open source tools. It seems that Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub has more adoption than goa with 3.46K GitHub stars and 389 GitHub forks.