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Kong vs Micro: What are the differences?
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.
What is Micro? A microservice toolkit. Micro provides the core requirements for building and managing microservices. It consists of a set of libraries and tools which are primarily geared towards development in the programming language Go, however looks to solve for other languages via HTTP using a Sidecar.
Kong and Micro can be categorized as "Microservices" tools.
Some of the features offered by Kong are:
- 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
On the other hand, Micro provides the following key features:
- API
- CLI
- Web UI
Kong and Micro are both open source tools. It seems that Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Micro with 6.45K GitHub stars and 528 GitHub forks.
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.
Pros of Kong
- Easy to maintain37
- Easy to install32
- Flexible26
- Great performance21
- Api blueprint7
- Custom Plugins4
- Kubernetes-native3
- Security2
- Has a good plugin infrastructure2
- Agnostic2
- Load balancing1
- Documentation is clear1
- Very customizable1
Pros of Micro
- Great flexibility1
- Nice tooling1
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What is Kong?
What is Micro?
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