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Well, do you need an API gateway in front of your http microservices? If you know what all of those things are, you might want Kong or one of its competitors.
by SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
Well, do you need an API gateway in front of your http microservices? If you know what all of those things are, you might want Kong or one of its competitors.
Kong's engine is NGINX, so if you're happy configuring NGINX itself and that is good enough for you, you won't want Kong.
- blumomo 7y agoAh, so Kong basically brings all my different API servers together and provides a single API endpoint to the outside world instead of using customers learn about different endpoints in different servers?
- SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago> brings all my different API servers together and provides a single API endpoint to the outside world Correct. And gives you a single entry point where routing to the "different endpoints in different servers" can be controlled, and cross-cutting concerns can be applied - e.g. request logging, auth, rate limiting, https termination etc. This is not unique to Kong, that is what a API Gateway product will do. But Kong is a fairly full-featured and configurable example of an API Gateway. e.g. you can write Kong plugins, in lua.
- jordanbeiber 7y agoCould be any number of outside endpoints as well. Imagine a dev shop with several teams, all building external facing apis. In this scenario you don’t want each team to reinvent the “external access, auth, audit & accounting” as well as rate limiting stuff. It would take a lot of resources and probably end up insecure at places. An API gateway gives you a convention and pluggable authentication system for the teams to consume and not worry about. At least in theory. Something like that. :)