Summary
In the previous posts we have discussed what role API gateway plays within the technology landscape and why would technology teams apply this design pattern.
In this post, we lists popular API gateway options currently available in the market (both – the open source and proprietary ones).
Each entry in the list will eventually contain the short review based on API gateway evaluation checklist.
The goal of this list is to provide the initial guidance for technology leaders and architects who are doing technical fitness checks for potential API gateway products for their organization.
Kong Api Gateway
Kong API gateway is an open source API management application. It is based on battle tested Nginx reverse proxy and OpenResty web framework which give it a very robust technical foundations.
Kong gateway has a modular architecture with the well defined support for custom plugins / extensions.
There is a selection of plugins available in the Kong plugin directory – OAuth 2.0, JWT, Rate Limiting and others. Developer community has also produced quite few plugins and extensions.
Konga or Kong Dashboard are good examples of such developer community contributions.
Tyk
3Scale
3Scale API gateway is based on Nginx technology and OpenResty web framework – similar to already mentioned Kong.
Even after RedHat bought 3Scale in 2017 its still a proprietary & closed source product at the time of writing. They offer cloud hosted version of API Gateway product with 90 days free trial.