Ask HN: What's Your (non-AWS) API Gateway Solution?

7 pointsanewlanguage9y ago3 comments

I recently started looking for an API Gateway that I could deploy in front of our various RESTful services in order to centralize authentication, access logging, metrics, versioning, and throttling. I won't pretend that we have a microservice architecture, we do have a bunch of services written in various languages, and I thought it would be a good idea to implement something like this in order to normalize them, even if it means a slight performance hit.

I was surprised that this isn't a topic that's really been discussed on HN. So far I've looked at Tyk, Kong, Zuul, Gravitee.io, and Apiman. Here's what I found:

- Tyk and Kong seem promising but their free versions are fairly hobbled, and I work for a non-profit without any real software budget.

- Kong has some interesting community tools, but they don't seem very mature yet.

- Zuul seems like more of a library than a service, and looks like it might require you to buy into the entire Netflix stack to get real benefit from it.

- Gravitee.io looked nice, but it seems like a very small operation, and it's hard to know if it has any staying power.

- Apiman does most of what I need, but it's in maintenance mode, due to Redhat pivoting towards 3scale (a commercial solution, that again, I can't pay for.)

Right now I'm leaning towards using Apiman, and maybe forking it if the official repo becomes too slow. But I'd love to hear others' thoughts or experiences on deploying an API Gateway. Are there other options I haven't considered? Is this even a pattern that people are using in the wild? Has anyone tried it and decided it caused more problems then it solved?

3 comments

jively9y ago

(Full disclosure: I work for Tyk): The free version of Tyk isn't hobbled, we don't withhold functionality from the open source gateway at all (in fact, that's where most of the new tech development goes).

All features are available and usable, even analytics gathering, though not with our dashboard (but that doesn't stop you using ELK or some other time series DB to store and analyse the data - that's why we have Tyk Pump, to remove any dependencies on our paid-for software).

The dashboard for our gateway is indeed closed and we charge for it, however if you are only running one gateway, then it's completely free.

For non-profits, we offer significant discounts, so it's worth getting in touch with us to see what we can do to help you out :-)

anewlanguageOP9y ago

Thanks a lot for clearing that up! The gateway seems difficult to use without the dashboard, and I gave up on installing the dashboard at the point in the instructions where it said I had to get a trial license. I didn't realize you could keep renewing the "trial", as long as its just a single node. I'll give it another shot, because we might be able to get by with a single gateway, and if not, the non-profit discount sounds promising.

worldwar9y ago

Just heard of openresty and nginx + lua but have not try it yet.

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