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Istio vs Kong

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Istio
627
1.1K
+ 1
42
Kong
455
1.1K
+ 1
130
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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.

Decisions about Istio and Kong
Prateek Mittal
Fullstack Engineer| Ruby | React JS | gRPC at Ex Bookmyshow | Furlenco | Shopmatic · | 4 upvotes · 141.8K views
Chose
Istio
over
Traefik
Kong

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 Istio
Pros of Kong
  • 11
    Zero code for logging and monitoring
  • 8
    Service Mesh
  • 7
    Great flexibility
  • 4
    Ingress controller
  • 3
    Resiliency
  • 3
    Easy integration with Kubernetes and Docker
  • 3
    Full Security
  • 3
    Powerful authorization mechanisms
  • 36
    Easy to maintain
  • 30
    Easy to install
  • 24
    Flexible
  • 20
    Great performance
  • 5
    Api blueprint
  • 4
    Custom Plugins
  • 3
    Kubernetes-native
  • 2
    Agnostic
  • 1
    Documentation is clear
  • 1
    1
  • 1
    123123
  • 1
    12312312
  • 1
    123
  • 1
    12

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Cons of Istio
Cons of Kong
  • 10
    Performance
    Be the first to leave a con

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    What is 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.

    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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Istio?
    What companies use Kong?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Istio or Kong.
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    What tools integrate with Istio?
    What tools integrate with Kong?

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    Blog Posts

    How Mashape Manages Over 15,000 APIs & Microservices
    Sep 25 2015 at 8:45AM

    Kong

    +26
    28
    15252
    What are some alternatives to Istio and Kong?
    linkerd
    linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.
    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.
    Kubernetes
    Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.
    Conduit
    Conduit is a lightweight open source service mesh designed for performance, power, and ease of use when running applications on Kubernetes. Conduit is incredibly fast, lightweight, fundamentally secure, and easy to get started with.
    AWS App Mesh
    AWS App Mesh is a service mesh based on the Envoy proxy that makes it easy to monitor and control containerized microservices. App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and helping to ensure high-availability for your applications. App Mesh gives you consistent visibility and network traffic controls for every microservice in an application. You can use App Mesh with Amazon ECS (using the Amazon EC2 launch type), Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes on AWS.
    See all alternatives

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