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Hystrix

174
163
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2
Kong

641
1.5K
+ 1
139
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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.

Decisions about Hystrix and Kong
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 308.2K views

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.

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Pros of Hystrix
Pros of Kong
  • 2
    Cirkit breaker
  • 37
    Easy to maintain
  • 32
    Easy to install
  • 26
    Flexible
  • 21
    Great performance
  • 7
    Api blueprint
  • 4
    Custom Plugins
  • 3
    Kubernetes-native
  • 2
    Security
  • 2
    Has a good plugin infrastructure
  • 2
    Agnostic
  • 1
    Load balancing
  • 1
    Documentation is clear
  • 1
    Very customizable

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What is Hystrix?

Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.

What is Kong?

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.

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What companies use Hystrix?
What companies use Kong?
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What tools integrate with Hystrix?
What tools integrate with Kong?

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What are some alternatives to Hystrix and Kong?
Akka
Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.
Envoy
Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.
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.
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.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
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