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Istio vs Kong: What are the differences?
What is Istio? Open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices, by Google, IBM, and Lyft. 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.
What is 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.
Istio and Kong can be primarily classified as "Microservices" tools.
"Zero code for logging and monitoring" is the primary reason why developers consider Istio over the competitors, whereas "Easy to maintain" was stated as the key factor in picking Kong.
Istio and Kong are both open source tools. Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Istio with 18.5K GitHub stars and 3.1K GitHub forks.
Checkr, Policygenius, and Decision6 are some of the popular companies that use Kong, whereas Istio is used by Entelo, Cuemby, and AgFlow. Kong has a broader approval, being mentioned in 50 company stacks & 14 developers stacks; compared to Istio, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.
What is Istio?
What is Kong?
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Why do developers choose Istio?
Why do developers choose Kong?
- Flexible17
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What are the cons of using Istio?
What are the cons of using Kong?
What companies use Kong?
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What tools integrate with Istio?
What tools integrate with Kong?
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I use Kong because it reliably proxies traffic quickly with an assortment of pluggable features. The engineers behind the product are of the highest quality. The Company has cultivated the largest active open source community of any API gateway. They generally squash bugs in hours or days not weeks/months. Company engineers help community members through social avenues as well as supporting large enterprise. They heavily value their product and individuals as opposed to just solely growing enterprise license fees.
LunchBadger
We needed a lightweight and completely customizable #microservices #gateway to be able to generate #JWT and introspect #OAuth2 tokens as well. The #gateway was going to front all #APIs for our single page web app as well as externalized #APIs for our partners.
ContendersWe looked at Tyk Cloud and Kong. Kong's plugins are all Lua based and its core is NGINX and OpenResty. Although it's open source, it's not the greatest platform to be able to customize. On top of that enterprise features are paid and expensive. Tyk is Go and the nomenclature used within Tyk like "sessions" was bizarre, and again enterprise features were paid.
DecisionWe ultimately decided to roll our own using ExpressJS into Express Gateway because the use case for using ExpressJS as an #API #gateway was tried and true, in fact - all the enterprise features that the other two charge for #OAuth2 introspection etc were freely available within ExpressJS middleware.
OutcomeWe opened source Express Gateway with a core set of plugins and the community started writing their own and could quickly do so by rolling lots of ExpressJS middleware into Express Gateway
KongWe're a small startup in San Francisco (team of 18 people). After spending lots of time building our core technology, it was time to bring it to life and deploy with several very large customers (500+ API requests/customer/minute).
We looked for a solid API management solution that would allow for easy authentication, quick installation and great logging features (requests and responses). After looking at various (very) expensive solutions out there, we ran into Kong.
After testing it for a few days, we deployed quickly to production to serve the needs of our customers. 3 weeks in, our experience has been great. Highly recommended to anyone who's looking for API management solutions.
P.s. Scored "Reliability" as "OK" for now with lack of data. Will definitely update once we've had Kong in production for a longer period of time.
KongAnd if developper can also code the load balancer ? Add plugin, dynamically change backend, Kong give this versatility
KongEasy to use