Kong- Multi-cloud, Microservice API Gateway
What’s an API Gateway?
An API Gateway is a software application that resides in front of an API and serves as a single point of entry for specified back-end APIs and micro-services(which can be public or private). Residing in front of APIs, the gateway serves as a defender, enforcing security and ensuring scalability and high availability.
What it does ?
- Routes Incoming Requests to appropriate backend service.
- Transform service responses to format needed by caller.
- Performs cross-cutting tasks like Authentication, Logging, Monitoring & Observability, Rate limiting & Attack’s Mitigation
- Offers deployment strategies such as Blue/Green and Canary releases.
What’s Kong Gateway?
- Most popular open-source cloud-native API gateway .
- It’s a Lua Application built on top of Nginx web server and OpenResty framework.
- Template engine that aids in the reduction of event time and promises to provide unmatched latency performance.
- Supports hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure, optimized for micro-services and distributed architecture.
- Available in Community & Enterprise Editions.
Why choose Kong?
Kong provides lot of benefits, few of them are listed below
Time to Market
Kong allows Organizations to shorten their time to market. Enables faster development of new product and services.
Performance
Kong is built on top of a lightweight proxy to deliver unparalleled latency, performance and scalability for all your micro-service applications.
Cloud-Native
Kong can run on any platform — from bare metal to containers — and it can run on every cloud natively
Platform Agnostic
Kong can be deployed anywhere, including on-premises, public and private clouds. Kong is fully platform agnostic, this means you can easily move applications between a private data center and a public cloud. You can even move it from one public cloud to another, or set up a global hybrid environment that spans any number of data-centers and cloud environments.
Kong liberates you from cloud vendor lock-in and gives you complete control over your computing environment.
Accelerates Innovation
Kong enables to create better, faster and more reliable services. Instantly enables developers to build using emerging protocols gRPC, WebSockets, GraphQL and Kafka including REST services.
How Kong works ?
By default, Kong Gateway listens for traffic on its configured proxy port(s). It analyzes incoming client API requests and routes them to the appropriate backend APIs. While routing requests and providing responses, policies can be applied via plugins as necessary.
For example, before routing a request, the client might be required to authenticate. This delivers several benefits, including:
- The service doesn’t need its own authentication logic since Kong Gateway is handling authentication.
- The service only receives valid requests and therefore cycles are not wasted processing invalid requests.
- All requests are logged for central visibility of traffic.
Wrapping Up
There’s lot about Kong, see you in an upcoming post to explore more about Kong …