Kong vs SkyDNS

Overview

SkyDNS

Stacks8

Followers23

Votes2

GitHub Stars2.2K

Forks304

Kong

Stacks672

Followers1.5K

Votes139

GitHub Stars42.1K

Forks5.0K

Kong vs SkyDNS: 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 SkyDNS? Distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. SkyDNS is a distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. It leverages Raft for high-availability and consensus, and utilizes DNS queries to discover available services. This is done by leveraging SRV records in DNS, with special meaning given to subdomains, priorities and weights (more info here: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns).

Kong belongs to "Microservices Tools" category of the tech stack, while SkyDNS can be primarily classified under "Open Source Service Discovery".

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, SkyDNS provides the following key features:

You announce your service by submitting JSON over HTTP to SkyDNS with information about your service. This information will then be available for queries either via DNS or HTTP.
SkyDNS requires that services submit an HTTP request to update their TTL within the TTL they last supplied. If the service fails to do so within this timeframe SkyDNS will expire the service automatically. This will allow for nodes to fail and DNS to reflect this quickly.
You can find services by querying SkyDNS via any DNS client or utility. It uses a known domain syntax with wildcards to find matching services.

Kong and SkyDNS are both open source tools. Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than SkyDNS with 1.97K GitHub stars and 301 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on SkyDNS, Kong

Prateek

Mar 14, 2020

Decided

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.

322k views322k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

SkyDNS	Kong
SkyDNS is a distributed service for announcement and discovery of services. It leverages Raft for high-availability and consensus, and utilizes DNS queries to discover available services. This is done by leveraging SRV records in DNS, with special meaning given to subdomains, priorities and weights (more info here: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns).	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.
You announce your service by submitting JSON over HTTP to SkyDNS with information about your service. This information will then be available for queries either via DNS or HTTP.;SkyDNS requires that services submit an HTTP request to update their TTL within the TTL they last supplied. If the service fails to do so within this timeframe SkyDNS will expire the service automatically. This will allow for nodes to fail and DNS to reflect this quickly.;You can find services by querying SkyDNS via any DNS client or utility. It uses a known domain syntax with wildcards to find matching services.	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; IP-restriction: Whitelist or blacklist IPs that can make requests; Authentication: Manage consumer credentials query string and header tokens; Rate-limiting: Block and throttle requests based on IP or authentication; Transformations: Add, remove or manipulate HTTP params and headers on-the-fly; CORS: Enable cross-origin requests to your APIs that would otherwise be blocked; Anything: Need custom functionality? Extend Kong with your own Lua plugins;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 2.2K	GitHub Stars 42.1K
GitHub Forks 304	GitHub Forks 5.0K
Stacks 8	Stacks 672
Followers 23	Followers 1.5K
Votes 2	Votes 139
Pros & Cons
Pros 2 Srv discovery for etcd	Pros 37 Easy to maintain 32 Easy to install 26 Flexible 21 Great performance 7 Api blueprint
Integrations
No integrations available	Cassandra Docker Prometheus Kubernetes PostgreSQL NGINX Vagrant

What are some alternatives to SkyDNS, Kong?

Consul

Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.

Eureka

Eureka is a REST (Representational State Transfer) based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Zookeeper

A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.

Tyk Cloud

Tyk is a leading Open Source API Gateway and Management Platform, featuring an API gateway, analytics, developer portal and dashboard. We power billions of transactions for thousands of innovative organisations.

etcd

etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.

Keepalived

The main goal of this project is to provide simple and robust facilities for loadbalancing and high-availability to Linux system and Linux based infrastructures.

Moesif

Build a winning API platform with instant, meaningful visibility into API usage and customer adoption

Ambassador

Map services to arbitrary URLs in a single, declarative YAML file. Configure routes with CORS support, circuit breakers, timeouts, and more. Replace your Kubernetes ingress controller. Route gRPC, WebSockets, or HTTP.

Trovald

Trovald is an intelligent API gateway that automatically routes LLM requests to the most cost-efficient model cutting AI infrastructure costs by 30–60% with zero code changes. You only pay when you save.

Related Comparisons

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, SkyDNS provides the following key features:

You announce your service by submitting JSON over HTTP to SkyDNS with information about your service. This information will then be available for queries either via DNS or HTTP.
SkyDNS requires that services submit an HTTP request to update their TTL within the TTL they last supplied. If the service fails to do so within this timeframe SkyDNS will expire the service automatically. This will allow for nodes to fail and DNS to reflect this quickly.
You can find services by querying SkyDNS via any DNS client or utility. It uses a known domain syntax with wildcards to find matching services.

Kong and SkyDNS are both open source tools. Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than SkyDNS with 1.97K GitHub stars and 301 GitHub forks.

Kong vs SkyDNS