Hystrix vs Kong: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here is a comparison between Hystrix and Kong, focusing on the key differences between the two technologies.

1. Hystrix: Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to aid in creating resilient and responsive applications by isolating dependencies between services. It provides features like circuit breaking, thread pool isolation, and fault tolerance.

2. Kong: Kong is a cloud-native, scalable, and high-performance API gateway built on top of Nginx. It acts as an intermediary between clients and servers, providing advanced API management capabilities such as request routing, rate limiting, authentication, and more.

3. Circuit Breaker vs API Gateway: Hystrix focuses on implementing circuit breaker patterns to handle failures within microservices, while Kong serves as an API gateway that acts as a central entry point for all API requests.

4. Resiliency Infrastructure vs API Management: Hystrix primarily focuses on providing a resilient infrastructure for microservices, allowing developers to isolate and handle faults, whereas Kong primarily focuses on API management, providing features like authentication, traffic control, and analytics.

5. Application-level vs System-level: Hystrix operates at the application level, managing dependencies between microservices within the application, while Kong operates at the system level, managing the overall API ecosystem and interactions with external clients.

6. Developer-centric vs API Consumer-centric: Hystrix is more developer-centric, providing tools and libraries to build resilient applications, while Kong is more API consumer-centric, providing features and functionalities to manage and control access to APIs.

In summary, Hystrix primarily focuses on providing resiliency infrastructure for microservices at the application level, while Kong primarily focuses on API management at the system level, catering to API consumer needs.