Kong vs Vulcand

Overview

Kong

Stacks671

Followers1.5K

Votes139

GitHub Stars42.1K

Forks5.0K

Vulcand

Stacks3

Followers17

Votes0

Kong vs Vulcand: What are the differences?

Developers describe Kong as "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. On the other hand, Vulcand is detailed as "Programmatic load balancer backed by Etcd". Vulcand is a programmatic extendable proxy for microservices and API management. It is inspired by Hystrix and powers Mailgun microservices infrastructure.

Kong and Vulcand are primarily classified as "Microservices" and "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" tools respectively.

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, Vulcand provides the following key features:

Uses Etcd as a configuration backend.
API and command line tool.
Pluggable middlewares.

Kong and Vulcand are both open source tools. Kong with 22.4K GitHub stars and 2.75K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Vulcand with 2.8K GitHub stars and 214 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 Kong, Vulcand

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

Kong	Vulcand
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.	Vulcand is a programmatic extendable proxy for microservices and API management. It is inspired by Hystrix and powers Mailgun microservices infrastructure.
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;	Uses Etcd as a configuration backend.;API and command line tool.;Pluggable middlewares.;Support for canary deploys, realtime metrics and resiliency.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 42.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 671	Stacks 3
Followers 1.5K	Followers 17
Votes 139	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 37 Easy to maintain 32 Easy to install 26 Flexible 21 Great performance 7 Api blueprint	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Cassandra Docker Prometheus Kubernetes PostgreSQL NGINX Vagrant	etcd

What are some alternatives to Kong, Vulcand?

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

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.

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.

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

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.

Moesif

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

Hipache

Hipache is a distributed proxy designed to route high volumes of http and websocket traffic to unusually large numbers of virtual hosts, in a highly dynamic topology where backends are added and removed several times per second. It is particularly well-suited for PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and other environments that are both business-critical and multi-tenant.

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.

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, Vulcand provides the following key features:

Uses Etcd as a configuration backend.
API and command line tool.
Pluggable middlewares.

Kong vs Vulcand